On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Change of pace. I found this on the give-away table in the hall upstairs. Somehow when I see a book that I loved lying in such a place, I just have to take it. (Explains my three copies of Mistress Masham's Repose). I really didn't intend to sit down and read it, but it was the old edition with the Garth Williams illustrations, so I flipped through it. Next thing I knew I had read from the middle to the end - so it seemed only logical to go back to the beginning and read up to where I began.

I've always been charmed by the way that Laura grows up in the series - not just the character, but the vocabulary and sentence structure and general tone of the stories. In this one she goes from seven to eight with Mary a year ahead and Carrie a toddler. Before Baby Grace, and before Mary becomes blind.

I'm glad I still like them.

Quietly in Their Sleep by Donna Leon

Somehow this one seemed a little more intense than previous ones. While Leon's stories tend to be rather dark, this one went beyond - or maybe it was just the subject matter. There are two story lines both involving corruption and abuse of position/power in the church.

In one, a priest who abuses little girls - and happens to be Brunetti's daughter Chiara's religion teacher - is found out and through family connections is appropriately dealt with. The other involves murder and madness and money and the Opus Dei and the bad guys totally get away with it.

In a departure, Brunetti is injured rather seriously by a crazy woman with a large knife. His recovery is complicated by a severe infection in the cut which is apparently the result of mishandling in the ER at the most charitable, and there are hints that the aforementioned bad guys arranged the malpractice with the intention of killing him since the crazy woman didn't finish him.

And after all that discription: the title actually works. It starts out with a report of a number of nursing home patients who died "quietly in their sleep" although they were at no immediate risk of death.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

One of the developmental English teachers is using this for the novel for her class so, since I have been impressed by her intelligence and judgment, I decided to read it.

I absolutely loved it. Coraline reminded me somewhat of Isobel ("Isobel, Isobel didn't worry; Isobel didn't fret nor flurry. She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, then Isobel calmly ate the bear up.") It could be very dark and quite frightening, but Coraline is a very brave and practical child and proceeds in spite of the general creepiness. Gaiman uses the juxtaposition of normality and "the other" to excellent effect.

Coraline is the centerpiece, though. "On the first day Coraline's family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly." That tells you what you need to know about Coraline.

Still, while it is totally charming, I can't help wondering if the whimsy will be lost on reluctant readers.

Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

Book Four of the Codex Alera. More fighting, more intrigue. Tavi finally announces himself as Gaius Octavian son of Septimus, etc. More crises, more of everything. This one spent a good bit of the end blatantly setting up the next book. I find that I didn't resent that as much as I have with some others. In large part, I think, because the characters are so satisfying. And, too, although the story has become fragmented, the individual story lines are still satisfying and their joint focus is always apparent. AND they actually tie together at the end, even though two more books are coming.

Character development is always an issue in a mmvfs*. I am cautiously optimistic about this one - oh, hell, four volumes in is too late for caution. I am optimistic about this one. The qualities that made Tavi an interesting character as a young boy in book one - his stubbornness, his innate sense of right and wrong, his refusal to accept limitations - persist in the young adult Octavian. He is still all of that, but with maturity and perception of necessity. As a boy, he runs off to fetch home the sheep that he neglected when he chose instead to get flowers that a girl asked him for. The result is that Bernard, his uncle, is gravely injured and Tavi himself is nearly killed in the storm which follows. Octavian, as Captain of a legion, mourns every man that he puts in harms way, but bows to the necessity - and leads them.

Even the side characters grow. One of the more interesting is Marcus/Fidelias. He is Amara's master in Cursor training and betrays her and the First Lord to the Aquitaines. He appears then as Aquitaine's chief spy and assassin. And in this book and the previous one as the First Spear (appears to be the senior noncom) in the First Aleran Legion of which Tavi becomes the Captain. He, of course, was put in place by the Aquitaines to assassinate Tavi if he seems likely to become a threat to their plans. However, the back story on Fidelias is that he betrayed Sextus, the First Lord (read King), because he believed quite honestly that he had become a danger to the realm. Serving in Tavi's legion convinces him that Tavi is the future and when he is in place to kill Tavi, he kills instead both the senator who is a tool of Aquitaine and Lady Aquitaine herself. Except that she wasn't as dead as all that, but that is part of the set up for the next book.

*massive multi-volume fantasy series

Cursor's Fury by Jim Butcher

More gore, more war - but at least now we definitely know that Tavi is really Gaius Octavian, son of Septimus, son of Sextus, son of Quintus, I suppose. I had been pretty sure of that since book one, but they hadn't given out enough details to figure out how he came to be an apprentice shepherd at a rural hold.

With a little more info on their military system, all becomes clear. It seems that (now in book three it can be told) they have a universal draft, not just men. Women fulfill their obligation by working as domestics for the legions. So that is how Isana and her sister came to be on the scene. Septimus, of course, falls for Isana and actually marries her - what? you mean you hadn't figured out that Tavi is Isana's son, not her nephew?

Anyway, in the final passages of that war, Septimus sends his BFF (and the greatest swordsman the world has ever known) Araris Valerian off to guard the pregnant Isana and her sister. In their flight, the sister is killed, Tavi is born, and Araris turns himself into the half-wit slave Fade to stay at hand to guard Isana and Tavi.

All that, however, is ancient history. In this story, Tavi sort of accidentally becomes the commanding officer of a rookie legion and leads them to victory against the Canem (sure am glad I know some Latin). The Canem are big, vicious dog critters who are in league with the evil villain who wants to take the throne from Gaius Sextus. Well, one of the evil villains who wants to take the throne from Gaius Sextus. But it turns out that they were actually leaving their homeland, lock, stock, wives and puppies, because of some nameless threat.

So, book four is set up and ready to go.

Wench: A Novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

After the discussion at today's luncheon, I debated about whether or not to force myself through the rest of this. It isn't that it is not well written, it is just so damned depressing. And don't let anyone kid you - it is nothing like The Help. I gather that it is being promoted with "If you liked The Help, you'll love ... Lies, all lies. When the most voracious reader of our entire group announced that she had quit halfway through and had no intention of finishing it, I seriously considered just putting it aside. But another spoke up and pointed out an aspect of it that I had not quite considered. The plight of the slaves, both men and women, is the centerpiece, but the lives of the white women were appalling in their own way. For example, the "wench" who is the central character is installed by her master in the bedroom directly opposite his wife's - in the house that had belonged to his wife's family.

I kept on picking it up again, hoping that something would happen - but nothing ever does. Maybe that is the writer's point, but the thing is set ten years before The Emancipation Proclamation - so, in the historical context, you know something is coming, but you have no sense that it will come in time for any of the characters in the story.

I did finish it, reading very quickly! I suppose that it is well-researched and so on, there were definitely aspects of slavery as practiced in the United States that I was completely unaware of, but I'm not sure it was necessary for me to read this.

Well, when it is my turn to pick - the book I have in mind is not exactly a fun read either.

Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher

Book 2 in the Codex Alera - which goes on (at this point) for six volumes - large volumes. That may be it, although Dresden has certainly gone on longer than that. Of course, as I pointed out in the post for the first book, Dresden is Urban Fantasy and Alera is High Fantasy. The clue that book six may be the end is that the title is First Lord's Fury, which implies that our hero eventually gets promoted to that level and the First Lord is the top dog in Alera, and since, based on the title of the book actually under discussion, the title reflects Tavi's status. In book one he is merely the handicapped orphan nephew of a steadholder and his sister and in book two he has achieved his heart's desire which is to attend the academy making him an academ - Aleran for student.

Perhaps some discussion of the magic of Alera is in order. Furies are elemental spirits which attach themselves to humans. Those who attach a water fury are healers and empaths, those with earth furies are builders and control growing things, those with air furies can fly and call on them for enhanced vision, those with fire furies are metalworkers, and so on. These are only the basic implications; it is a fairly involved system. One of the fundamentals is that strong furies tend to attach themselves to strong competent individuals, hence an inherent heirarchy.

Personally, I believe that Butcher calls these entities "furies" because it allows him to indulge his penchant for puns and irony. All of the Dresden titles are word plays, here all of his Alera titles can be read at face value or in knowledge of the local meaning of "fury." The irony arises because our hero, Tavi, who is clearly intelligent and resourceful, has no furies. Therefore, in the Aleran context he is handicapped. There are clear indications that there is more to Tavi than meets the eye, but nothing that has been explicitly defined as yet.

I actually finished this several days ago. I don't know why I didn't write it up. Lack of time, maybe? And I have the distinct impression that I read something else between these two. Maybe I just started a couple and ended up getting hooked on this. I was reading a Wilkie Collins - and a book by Daniel Pink - but I guess I didn't finish either one of them. Guess I'd better before I read book three - of course, I have already started the next book club book. Oh, well.