What Are You Reading / Reviews - January thru June 2023

[Book Concierge]

Icy Sparks – Gwyn Hyman Rubio – 5****
We know much more about Tourette’s Syndrome today than during the timeframe of this story (1950s), and I hope even the residents of rural Appalachia would be more compassionate about a young girl so afflicted. Icy Sparks jumps off the pages of this book straight into the reader’s heart. This is a child who is curious, intelligent, kind, loving, and who learns to stand up to bullies and fight for herself. She shows empathy and compassion in her dealings with others even when they ostracize and belittle her.
LINK to my full review

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The Santa Suit – Mary Kay Andrews – 3***
This is a charming holiday rom-com with a bit of mystery. The small town is full of colorful characters, and as Ivy begins to become known around town she opens up to her new friends and to the possibility of a new romance. The ending is neatly tied up in a pretty ribbon, but hey, it’s a holiday romance, so I’m okay with that.
LINK to my full review

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The Farm – Joanne Ramos – 4****
Digital audiobook narrated by Fran de Leon.
Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is searching for a better opportunity to secure the future for herself and her daughter. So, she agrees to be a surrogate mother for a significant payback upon delivery. While the original premise seems plausible, the reality of Jane’s situation quickly devolves into a somewhat dystopian nightmare. It certainly held my attention and I really wanted to see how Jane would fare in this scenario. I think this would be a work that book clubs would love to discuss.
LINK to my full review

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The Last Word – Ellery Adams – 3***
This is book # 3 in the Books By the Bay cozy mystery series featuring Olivia Limoges, her dog Haviland, and a group of writers who meet regularly to discuss their works in progress. This plot involves an historical mystery of an escaped German POW during WW2, and a current-day award-winning author who is found murdered in his rental sea-side cottage. One thing I like about this series is how Adams slowly gives out the backstory of the characters, letting readers get to know Olivia, her extended family, and the residents of Oyster Bay over the course of the series.
LINK to my full review

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Marrying Winterborne – Lisa Kleypas – 3***
Book two in the Ravenels series focuses on Lady Helen Ravenel and Welsh department-store mogul Rhys Winterborne. Her family isn’t so keen on the engagement, but Lady Helen and Rhys will not be denied a wedding, even if they have to … well, if I told you that would spoil it. I certainly understand why Kleypas is so successful at the Regency romance genre. The road to happily ever after is full of bumps and detours to add tension and keep the reader turning pages, but the couple will get there.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Hesiod, etc., Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica [ancient; Loeb 3rd ed. 1936] 557 pages [Greek/English bilingual]

This volume of the Loeb Library contains the Greek texts and English translations by H.G. Evelyn-White of all the extant works attributed to Hesiod, including fragments and testimonia; the Homeric hymns, and other works attributed to Homer other than the Iliad and Odyssey; the "Contest of Homer and Hesiod"; and a selection of fragments from the Epic Cycle. Essentially the version from 1914, revised in 1919 and with a new appendix added by D.L. Page in 1935, this is the "old" Loeb version; in the "new" twenty-first century Loeb, which I haven't seen yet, the material in this volume together with much new material (including newly discovered papyri) is divided among four volumes: two volumes of Hesiod with translations by Glenn Most, one volume containing the Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, and Lives of Homer and one with all that remains of the Epic Cycle, both translated by M.L. West. (I may buy at least the much more complete Epic Cycle book at some point, but since I'm not a specialist I probably will make do with this one that I bought in college for the other things.) The translations in this older volume are very literal , which was useful to me since it has been probably a decade since I read any long works in Greek and I was very rusty on vocabulary. Unfortunatly, like many of the "old" Loeb translators, Evelyn-White has a predeliction for obscure and archaic words like "glebes", "chine", "withes" and "coombes"; he may be doing this deliberately to suggest the "feel" that the epic diction might have had for "classical" Greeks, but it is distracting, and I think any reader who had to rely on the translation would find it very annoying. Verily, I think I would not recommend many of the "old" Loeb translations to anyone who doesn't need the Greek texts. (The "new" Loeb editions are more contemporary in their translations, which is one reason the older volumes are being updated — apart from the obvious economic motivation as they are beginning to fall out of copyright.) There is also a brief but very good introduction (for the time) by Evelyn-White, although he didn't convince me of the unity of the Works and Days.

Hesiod

With regard to Hesiod, Evelyn-White argues that there was a real, mid-ninth-century poet named Hesiod and that he was the author of the Works and Days, the other poems attributed to him being later works by other now anonymous poets imitating his style or subject matter. This is of course controversial and many scholars today apparently date the Theogeny earlier than the Works and Days and place both Homer (if he can be dated at all, given the nature of oral composition) and Hesiod in the eighth century. Since my college courses in Greek literature were fifty years back, I am not in a position to judge this. The poems are written in the "epic" dialect and dactylic hexameter meter of Homer's epics.

If the Works and Days is in fact as Evelyn-White claims the only poem which is actually by Hesiod, it is hard to understand why he was ever coupled with Homer, apart from chronology. This work has none of the literary merit of Homer's two epics. It is addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses, with whom he has had a quarrel about an inheritance (some things haven't changed in millennia). Hesiod, who considers himself the aggrieved party, lectures Perses on how he ought to behave. The first few pages of the book read like a rather poorly constructed homily, full of platitudes — if you are lazy and covet other peoples property, the gods will punish you, but if you work hard you will become rich — if the gods wish it. In other words, you need a better work ethic. This section is relieved by examples from mythology (including the famous description of the five ages, the golden age, the silver age, the age of bronze, the age of heroes and the present age, with a prophecy of the "last times" that could have come out of a mediaeval homily), which are the only interesting part of the book except to specialist historians of agricultural techniques. The relevance of the myths to the argument of the sermon is not always apparent. The book then turns to a discussion of agriculture, and later sea trade, giving much practical advice, but still harping on hard work and the work ethic. If the frame story is true (Evelyn-White thinks it is, while many other scholars then and now consider it a fictional excuse for the moralizing) I think Perses would simply find it terribly annoying. The poem then falls apart completely into one or two sentence "gnomic" utterances in completely miscellaneous order, mixing practical banalities with superstition: Avoid the anger of the gods. Do not treat a friend equally with a brother, but if you do, do not offend him first, but if he offends you, pay him back double. Do not blame a man for being poor. Do not be churlish at a common dinner. Do not offer libations to Zeus after dawn without washing your hands first. Do not pee standing up facing the sun. Do not have sex after returning from a burial. Do not cross a river with unwashed hands. Do not cut your fingernails at a religious ceremony. And so on and so forth. If this weren't boring enough, he then finishes with several pages about what is lucky or unlucky to do on various days of the month.

This editon follows the Works and Days with five short testimonia, some of which contain actual fragments, of a work called the Astronomy, which seems to have been a collection of myths explaining the constellations (although perhaps Hesiod or whoever wrote it linked them to "works and days", and the later writers who cited him simply extracted the mythical passages.) In any case the testimonia do not seem entirely consistent. Then come a few fragments and testimonia from other lost works, the Precepts of Chiron, the Great Works, and the Idaean Dactyls, about which we cannot form any real idea, but were probably similar in subject matter to the Works and Days. All these are only a few pages.

The longest surviving poem attributed to Hesiod, and by far the most important, is the Theogeny, a genealogy of the gods and mythical prehistory of the world, with some of the mythology attached to the various gods. This again is important as a systematic survey of Greek mythology before it was turned into literature by the later poets and dramatists, rather than as itself a literary work; none of the works here show Hesiod as much of a poet, frankly, even making allowance for the likelihood that much spurious material has been interpolated, as the later Greek critics recognized. Perhaps to be generous we can blame it on the interpolators, but the account of the gods is not entirely consistent; for example the three Fates, Atropos, Lachesis and Klotho, are described first as the offspring of Night in the pre-Olympian era, and later as the daughters of Zeus and Themis.

This is followed by about a hundred short fragments and testimonia which Evelyn-White considers are probably from either the Catalogue of Women or the Eoiai, assuming these were separate works.

Then he prints the Shield of Heracles, the third complete poem (although I think he is correct in considering that it is actually just a long fragment of the Eoiai rather than a separate work.) This is a really poorly constructed poem, with many obvious interpolations. It begins with the story of Amphitryon and Alcmene and the birth of Heracles and Iphicles, then shifts abruptly to preparations for a single combat between Heracles and Cycnus (and his father, the god Ares.) The preparations are interrupted by a long description of Heracles' shield, which gives the work its later title, and which is a poor imitation of Homer's description of the shield of Achilles. The poem then resumes the preparations and describes the battle, with many long-winded similes imitated from Homer which add nothing to the poem. This is followed by more fragments and testimonia from other lost works (The Great Eoiai, Melampodia, Aigimius,etc.)

The Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of 33 poems about various divinities, which were sometimes attributed in antiquity to Homer, although many ancient critics disputed the attribution. They are not Homeric and they are not really hymns in any liturgical sense. The modern consensus is that they were written by multiple authors and were all later than either Homer or Hesiod, although at least the major poems are still among the oldest surviving Greek literature. The exact dates are controversial. Some of the shorter poems may have been added later, even very much later; some of them are just extracts of the longer poems (for instance the second hymn to Hermes is just the beginning and ending lines of the long hymn) which many scholars believe were intended as invocations to introduce recitations of other poems. The first two hymns were rediscovered rather later than the others and are only found in a single manuscript.

The first hymn is a short fragment invoking Dionysus.

The second hymn, to Demeter, is one of the oldest and undoubtedly the best poem of the collection; it is often published as a separate book. It tells the story of the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the sorrows of Demeter in a very stiking way and is not unworthy to be described as "Homeric".

Evelyn-White divides the third hymn, to Apollo, into two parts, one of which he calls a hymn to Delian Apollo and the other a hymn to Pythian (i.e. Delphic) Apollo. Neither part is particularly good. The first part tells the story of the birth of Apollo at Delos, and the second part deals with the founding of his oracle at Delphi. It begins with him searching for a site to build his oracle, and the way the various personified places talk him out of choosing them, until he comes to the island where the oracle was in fact built. It then describes in a few lines, more or less in passing, the killing of the serpent who brought up Typhoeus, which one would have expected to be the central event of the hymn. While elsewhere (including the Theogeny) Typhoeus is a tremendous elemental force of nature born from the Earth (obviously related to the Babylonian Tiamat) whom Zeus barely defeats shortly after his birth in a titanic struggle, and who if he had had more time to mature would have easily made himself the ruler of the gods, in this hymn he is a son of Hera conceived in a fit of pique against Zeus who is merely a nuisance to the mortals in the immediate neighborhood. The author then gives a bizarre etymology of the place name Pythos, deriving it from the verb meaning "to rot" because Apollo left the serpent to rot in the sun, which reminded me of a line in one of the Addams family movies. Then the majority of the hymn is an account of how Apollo, taking the form of a dolphin (for no apparent reason), hijacks a merchant ship from Crete and forces the sailors to become his priests. Much of the "story" is just a long list of places they sail by to get to his island.

The fourth hymn, to Hermes, is the longest, and is also good. It is a humorous account of the new-born Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo and what resulted. The author, like the translator, has a penchant for unusual vocabulary which made this the most difficult of the hymns for me to read. The fifth hymn, to Aphrodite, is about her affair with the Trojan Anchises and the conception of their son Aeneas, later to be made famous by Vergil. The sixth hymn to Dionysus, though short (two pages) is a well-told episode about pirates who try to kidnap the god and are turned into dolphins.

The remainder of the hymns are short, between a few lines to a couple of pages.
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[James]

The poems of the Epic Cycle

The next section contains a selection of fragments and testimonia from the lost poems of the so-called Epic Cycle. The longest testimonia are from a collection of summaries by later writer named Proclus (not the philosopher and mathematican of that name). The Epic Cycle was a group of epic poems telling the stories of the Theban Cycle (Oedipus, his sons, and the epigonoi) and the parts of the Trojan Cycle which were not included in the two longer epics of Homer. They were naturally sometimes attributed to Homer, but more often to other later poets about whom we know nothing. The attributions were not made with much confidence, and the testimonia tend to say things like this (from Athenaeus, in Evelyn-White's translation): "the author of the Cypria, whether Hegesias or Stasinus . . . whoever he was, writes . . ." In the form in which they were ultimately written down and known to the later Greeks, they are organized around the Iliad and the Odyssey as prequels, sequels, and "interquels" if there is such a word, but modern scholars have suggested that they selected their material from the same larger corpus of oral poetry about the Trojan War as the Homeric epics themselves. These fragments provide us with a tantalizing glimpse of the details and variations of myths which we all think we are familiar with from reading Greek tragedy and later writers.

The minor poems attributed to Homer and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod

The volume is rounded out with a short collection of epigrams attributed to Homer, a mock epic called the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of Frogs and Mice), and a short account of what was believed about the two poets called the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The Batrachomyomachia is a dactylic hexameter poem which describes a war between mice and frogs in the Homeric style with heroic formulas and epithets; the Suda attributes it to one Pigres of Halicarnassus, along with the Margites, a lost poem of apparently the same humorous type (which may be the source of the famous quotation about the fox and the hedgehog.) The Contest in the form we have it comes from the second century CE, but is undoubtedly put together from much earlier writings. The book ends with an appendix of fragments first published while it was in press, and a second appendix by Page with the fragments discovered or published between 1919 and 1935.

[Book Concierge]

Pray For Silence – Linda Castillo – 3.5***
This is book two in the Kate Burkholder series, set in an Ohio county with significant Amish population. This novel involves the brutal murders of a family of seven. I love murder mysteries that feature strong female leads, and I look forward to reading more of this series. But trigger warning: this is a very violent crime with some very disturbing discoveries about the victims and the perpetrators.
LINK to my full review

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The Cat Who Played Brahms – Lilian Jackson Braun – 3***
Book five in the delightful cozy mystery series starring James Qwilleran, and his Siamese Koko. Qwill decides to take a sabbatical from the paper, and vacation at a remote cabin on a lake “up north.” Mooseville is certainly NOT the big city, but something mysterious is going on; several of Qwill’s cherished possessions go missing and then a neighboring cabin owner is murdered. I really enjoy this series. I like Qwill and I like Koko, and NO, the cat doesn’t talk but his meanderings and occasional reaction to a visitor frequently point Qwill in the direction of a significant clue.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe [1718] 316 pages

I'm trying, as I enter into my retirement years, to fill in the gaps in my reading of the classics, works which I have somehow always skipped. I originally planned to begin the "modern" part of my project by completing my reading of Blake, one of the few English authors I read for a college class (I only took two literature classes in college), but on considering that my biggest gap was the eighteenth century (my high school English classes basically skipped from Shakespeare and Milton to the nineteenth century) I decided instead to go back to the beginnings of the eighteenth century with Defoe, Swift and the early novelists. As far as I know, I have never read Robinson Crusoe before, unless it was in grade school before I began keeping track of my reading (it was often considered a good book for children, before the current mania for judging older literature by whether it conforms to present-day political attitudes).

I have a certain fascination with origins, and Robinson Crusoe is one of the first English novels, depending on how the novel is defined. I really don't need to summarize the plot, which is familiar to everyone as part of popular culture whether or not they have read the original book: the solitary man shipwrecked on an uninhabited island who manages to survive and create a reasonably comfortable life by his own ingenuity; the rescuing of "Friday" from the cannibals, and the final deliverance and return to England. There is something of universal appeal in this celebration of human ability. The novel has an undercurrent of religious sentiment which is usually left out of the popular adaptations, as for other reasons is the account of his life as a slave-owning planter in Brazil (he was shipwrecked on a mission to buy slaves in Africa.) In fact I was a bit surprised that the shipwreck happens a quarter of the way through the book.

After reading so much contemporary literature with the almost obligatory tragic endings, I enjoyed the fact that this was such an optimistic book, despite the extreme situation of the hero. In fact, in the Afterword to the Signet Classic edition I read it in, Henry Swados makes the point that Defoe takes a model who was obviously mentally disturbed (Andrew Selkirk, whose voluntary marooning on a deserted island for four years was the probable inspiration for the novel) and turns him into a normal middle-class Englishman, while a contemporary novelist would more likely take a seemingly normal individual and reveal him to be psychologically abnormal.

[Book Concierge]

A Good American – Alex George – 5***** and a ❤
Book on CD performed by Gibson Frazier
This is a family saga, covering four generations of the Meisenheimer family over a century. As happens in real life, the family intersects with many of the residents of the town, and the reader gets to view history through the lens of their experiences. It is a story of immigrants, a story of quintessential Americans, a story of struggle and triumph and defeat and unabashed joy. I absolutely loved it and as soon as I had finished it, I wanted to read it again.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Paddy Chayefsky, The Tenth Man [1959] 100 pages

The Tenth Man is a three-act comedy first performed in 1959. The entire play takes place in a synagogue in Mineola, Long Island. It opens with a group of older men, Russian immigrants, looking for a tenth man to make up the quorum for the morning prayers. They manage to conscript a young, assimilated and hungover lawyer, Arthur Landau, who knows nothing about his religious traditions. Meanwhile, another of their group, Foreman, arrives with his mentally ill granddaughter Evelyn, whom he is convinced is possessed by a dybbuk. The situation plays out with many comic misunderstandings and ends with a romance between Arthur and Evelyn. A slight but enjoyable play.


William Shakespeare (and Thomas Middleton?), The Life of Timon of Athens [c. 1606] about 100 pages [Kindle]

One of Shakespeare's less often performed plays, which I will be seeing next month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. It's difficult to review a play which is so well-known and like all Shakespearian works has had so much written about it. The play is based on Plutarch and Lucian; it tells the story of a man who spends his fortune entertaining and helping his "friends", who abandon him when he runs out of funds, and ends up as a misanthropic recluse. With an obscure subplot about Alcibiades and an unsatisfying ending, it has often been considered as an unfinished work. We have no idea whether it was produced in Shakespeare's lifetime or not; the first attested production was in 1715 in Ireland.


Lilian Hellman, Toys in the Attic [1959] 84 pages

Another play from the end of the nineteen fifties, this is very "fiftyish" with much domestic angst. (The sixties had their own variety of angst which was rather different.) It deals with a poor family whose inner conflicts come to the fore when the ne'er-do-well brother shows up rich.

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The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane – Kate DiCamillo – 5*****
Book on CD performed by Judith Ivey
Oh, but I loved this modern-day fairy tale! Edward is a china rabbit, hand crafted and meticulously attired. He lives with Abilene and her parents and grandmother in a house on Egypt Street. And then … Well, you’ll have to read about his journey yourself. It’s about compassion, and sorrow and joy. About patience and perseverance and never, ever giving up hope. It’s about love and home and miracles.
LINK to my full review

[James]

Saul Levitt, The Andersonville Trial [1959] 88 pages

The Andersonville Trial was a play presented on Broadway in 1959, although it had already been performed in a shorter version as a television play in 1957. Although not a "documentary", it was based largely on the actual transcript of the trial of the commandant of the Fort Sumpter Military Prison, better known as Andersonville, Henry Wirz, the only Confederate officer to be executed as a war criminal after the Civil War. The edition I read did not have any introduction or notes.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, we were assigned to read a "historical novel", and (much to my teacher's horror) I read McKinley Kantor's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville. After more than half a century I can still remember some of the horrors represented in the book. One of my great-great-grandmothers had a brother who died at Andersonville, along with some fourteen thousand other Union prisoners. Some descriptions of the play I found on the Internet said that it was "inspired" by Kantor's novel, but I don't see much connection between the two. What they didn't say, although I think it should be obvious to anyone who read the play, is that it is a comment on the Nuremberg trials which were then fairly recent (as Kantor's choice of the subject may have been influenced by the German concentration camps). The basic issue raised by the play is whether "obeying orders" is a defense, or whether there are some orders which must be disobeyed no matter what the consequences.

[Book Concierge]

Dying For Chocolate – Diane Mott Davidson – 3***
This is book two in the popular Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery series. It has all the elements of a successful cozy mystery series: an amateur sleuth whose career puts her in contact with a wide range of people (whether victim or suspect), a home situation with added tension, a love interest, and some great recipes. I have to admit that Goldy is pretty resourceful when getting herself out of a jam and doesn’t always rely on the big strong detective to save her. On the other hand, if she kept her nose out of business that isn’t hers … well we wouldn’t have this series.
LINK to my full review

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Southtown – Rick Riordan – 4****
This is book five in the Tres Navarre mysteries. This is a hard-hitting detective series, and the body count climbs as the plot progresses. I like Tres. He’s intelligent and a bit sarcastic. The setting is practically a character, and Riordan includes many landmark locations that brought me back home again.
LINK to my full review

[James]

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus [c. 1607-1609] about 160 pages

Another play I will be seeing at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next month. Although I have read all of Shakespeare's plays at least twice and most several times, as far as I can remember I have never seen this one performed. As always, it is difficult to review a classic about which so much has been written. Probably derived mainly from Plutarch, Coriolanus is about a historical (or at least legendary) figure from the very earliest days of the Roman Republic; the play refers to his first battle having been against Tarquin's attempt to re-establish the monarchy. While I have not studied Roman history for a long time, it seems that Shakespeare has somewhat condensed events as he often does in his history plays.

The play opens with Menenius, the moderate, trying to mediate between the demands of the plebs and the Senate, only to be undercut on the one hand by the newly-established (and demagogic) tribunes and on the other by Marcius Caius, newly come from a military victory over the Volsces, who openly shows his contempt for the common people. The action then shifts to a new war with the Volsces, in which Marcius captures the Volscian city of Corioles, earning the name Coriolanus. On his return, he is honored by the populace, but unwisely chooses to stand for the consulship. He is elected by the Senate on behalf of the patricians, but then must secure the approval of the plebeians. Arrogantly, he shows his disdain of the people and Hillary-Clinton-like considers himself entitled to the consulate without reference to the people. Urged by his mother Volumnia and his friends to pacify the people, he is provoked by the tribunes into losing his temper and ends by being banished from Rome. He then makes an alliance with the Volscian leader Aufidius and invades Rome, camping under the walls of the city. He rejects the attempts of his former commander Cominius and his father-figure Menenius to make peace, but ultimately yields to the entreaties of his mother and wife. He then returns to the Volscians, where he is again provoked into losing his temper and is killed.

If I can with some diffidence offer an interpretation of a difficult play, I think Shakespeare intends to show that the patrician ethic of glory-seeking (for Coriolanus, despite his patriotic rhetoric, his military valor is more about his own glory than defending Rome) is as dangerous to the state as the more obvious seditions of the plebs. Undoubtedly, as with most of Shakespeare's plays, there was an application to the politics of his own time.

[Book Concierge]

Taken To the Cleaners – Dolores Johnson – 3***
The first book in the Mandy Dyer cozy mystery series gets the dry cleaner involved with a local bag lady brings in one of the cleaner’s signature laundry bags, inside of which is a bloody suit. I figured out the killer long before either Mandy or the police, but it still held my attention. This was first published in 1997 and it shows … limited computer use, no cell phones. Still, I’d be willing to try another in the series.
LINK to my full review

[Book Concierge]

The Violin of Auschwitz –Maria Àngels Anglada– 2.5**
I really wanted to like this book … no … I wanted to love this book. But it missed the mark for me. The basic story line is engaging and what kept me reading, but there were huge gaps that left me hungry for more detail. So, while the author played the reader’s heartstrings like a violin virtuoso, I felt that the book was unfinished.
LINK to my full review

[Book Concierge]

The Second-Worst Restaurant in France – Alexander McCall Smith – 3***
This is the second book featuring Paul Stuart, the “renowned Scottish cookbook writer.” He’s struggling with his latest book so jumps at the chance to accompany his cousin, Chloe, to France, where he hopes to find his muse, or at least a few great meals. There is not much plot to move the story along. Rather, Paul just stumbles into situations in the village as he meets new and interesting people. What I like about this book and several of McCall Smith’s other works are the characters. I enjoy peeping into their lives for a bit and watching the goings on from afar.
LINK to my full review

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The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina – Zoraida Córdova – 3.5***
This is unlike anything I’ve read before. Part family saga, part paranormal horror, part fantasy, part historical fiction, part quest, part love story. I’m so grateful that there is a family tree in the beginning, as I referred to it several times to clarify relationships of Orquídea’s many descendants. I was fascinated by the story but I think I need to re-read it to fully absorb the magic of Córdova’s storytelling.
LINK to my full review