Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 9

#TBRChallenge – Starting Over: A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey

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A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey is a 2001 book which begins with several traumatic events told in a lowkey voice of depression. Morgan Shelby works with children who have severely disfiguring birth defects. Despite the first sentence of the novel referring to “living gargoyles,” she is compassionate and empathetic to the child Asam, who’s about to undergo massive surgery, which we soon learn he does not survive. Morgan’s partner leaves her, and Morgan has to leave the home they ma...

My December Reading Log

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Fiction:
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a charming romance with older characters set in a contemporary small English village. Major Ernest Pettigrew, a widower of six years, has just been told his brother unexpectedly died, when he re-encounters the owner of their local grocery shop, Mrs. Jasmina Ali. Jasmina is a widow as well, and they make a swift and unexpected emotional connection. Their romance is mingled with family issues stemming from the major’s brother’s will a...

#TBRChallenge 2023

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This year, I’ll again be participating in the TBR Challenge hosted by Wendy the Super Librarian. My goal is to post reviews of a themed book on the third Wednesday of every month. Feel free to join me! Tag your social media posts with #TBRChallenge. The monthly themes, and my choices to fit those themes, are listed below. All of the books are from my To Be Read shelves (physical and virtual) as of December, 2022. I’ve tried to stick to the suggested themes, even though it’s not required.

Be...

#TBRChallenge – Festive: Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub

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Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub has been on my TBR for quite a while, along with a lot of other World War One reference books; some of them, I don’t read end to end, just dig into as needed. But this one was written for a general audience, and is not terribly long. To me, it’s meant to be festive but ultimately does not feel that way to me.

Please note that this post includes some unpleasant description of the realities of war.

The 1914 unoffi...

My November Reading Log

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Fiction:
An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch visited Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island, in 1878. After closing a politically sensitive case in his home country of England, Finch is pressured to visit the United States while the court case unfolds. Along the way he’s dragged into a murder case set among fabulously wealthy Americans who’ve built “cottages” (actually mansions) at the seaside; meanwhile, he muses upon his career and if he wants to continue with it. This novel is fourteenth in ...

#TBRChallenge – Lies: The Conductors by Nicole Glover

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I chose The Conductors by Nicole Glover for the “Lies” theme because it’s a murder mystery. However, it turned out to fit the theme in other ways as well: many of the suspects rewrote themselves and their lives to some extent after being freed from enslavement or moving up in the social order, meaning the investigators must constantly re-evaluate what they know and think they know. In addition, the protagonist Hetty Rhodes is a storyteller, and her thoughts about stories are relevant to the...

My October Reading Log

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Fiction:
Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala is second in a cozy mystery series; I have not read the first book, but was easily able to follow the story. Protagonist Lila Macapagal has returned to the cozy small town of Shady Palms (Somewhere in the Vicinity of Chicago) to live near her family, who own and operate a Filipino restaurant; Lila and two friends, a lesbian couple, are in the process of opening a coffee shop that also sells plants and Filipino-inspired baked goods. As you ...

“Cut Flowers,” Ivor Gurney

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Cut Flowers

Not in blue vases these
Nor white, cut flowers are seen
But in the August meadows
When the reaper falls clean –
And the shining and ridged rows
Of cut stalks show to the eye
As if some child’s hand there
Had ranged them, and passed by
To other rows, other swathes,
Moondaisies, pimpernel,
Eyebright, sorrel, the paths
Are shining, the heaps as well.
Violets in spring, are
In vases, a sweet heap
Better leave them by far
Under hedgerows or banks to keep.
Daffodills, wallflowers, Dai...

Rutabagas and Unicorns: The Windflower by Laura London

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This essay was written in 2012 for Heroes and Heartbreakers; it is no longer available there, as the site is defunct. I’m posting the essay again because Sharon Curtis passed away on September 4, 2022.

Every lady of breeding knows. No one has a good time on a pirate ship. No one, that is, but the pirates. Yet there she was, Merry Wilding—kidnapped in error, taken from a ship bound from New York to England, spirited away in a barrel and swept aboard the infamous Black Joke….There she was, tr...

#TBRChallenge – Exile by Lisa Bradley

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Exile by Lisa Bradley is a post-apocalyptic, character-driven science fiction novel which I bought because I had met and liked the author. The apocalypse in this novel was local, affecting people living nearby with uncontrollable, violent rage. The federal government subsequently quarantined the town, and it’s remained shut away from the outside world, though they do have wifi at least.

Mother was pregnant with Sweet William when an unregulated semi biffed the turn into the parking lot for ...