Reading

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Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

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There are a million stories....

In my post about manners yesterday, conuly brought up in the comments a couple of posts to Ask A Manager from An Awful Young Man, who, on the evidence given, probably knows all the intricacies of cutlery and which way to pass the port, but is unfit for release into general society:

First post:

I was travelling home on a packed train with my bike. Suddently, I was approached by a lady who asked me, rather rudely, to give my seat to a man, her father, who was travelling with her. Since I was sitting on a regular seat (not a seat designated for disabled passangers) and had to read some materials to prepare for my interview, I ignored her. Unfortunately, when I was getting off the train, I accidentally moved my bike in a way that it caught and left dirty stains on her coat. I did not think much of this till the next day when I ran into the same woman and one of directors in the lift in my office building. It transpired that she is the CEO’s wife. She said nothing and did not acknowledge me, but it was very clear to me that she recognised me.

He did not get the job and thinks Spiteful Bitch put the kibosh on. Commentators have a lovely time handing him his head.

Second post:

I wish I had been told the receptionist/janitor/security guard story by career services at my university, which is one of those prestigious English ones. (Note from Alison: This is a reference to advice that you should be polite to receptionists/janitors/security guards when interviewing.) We get a lot of tips about how to write our resume and cover letter and how we should conduct ourselves during interviews, but not this type of real life recommendation.

'I was raised by wolves before they threw me out of the pack for antisocial behaviour and somehow I got into Oxbridge'.

But, my dearios, is this not a positively archetypal morality tale? At least one of the commenters pointed out its resemblance to Folktale Motif of Young Man on Quest who Fails to Help Old Woman, Bad Luck Eventuates/His Despised Younger Brother Does Help Her, Go Him, Wealth and Princess Are His Lot.

So there's that one.

It could also make a 'Sliding Doors' tale where the different outcomes of doing the wrong and right thing change destiny.

Or maybe he's condemned to repeat that journey and interview over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he Learns His Lesson.

Or, maybe this is one of those novels that takes An Incident and does it from different viewpoints and that while to Mr I Am The Main Character here, this is all terribly important, there are other people who are going about their lives and barely noticing him unless they have to, and even then they have their own concerns.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

jcalanthe and

muckefuck!

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Hominids, by Robert Sawyer

A Neanderthal from an alternate universe where Homo Sapiens went extinct and Neanderthals lived into the present day is sucked into our world due to an experiment gone wrong. The book follows his interactions with humans in one storyline, and the repercussions in Neanderthal World in another.

I picked up this book because I like Neanderthals and alternate dimensions that aren't about relatively recent history (ie, not about "What if Nazis won WWII?"). The parts of the book that are actually about Neanderthal World are really fun. It's a genuinely different society, where men and women live separately for the most part, surveillance by implanted computers prevents most crime, mammoths and other large mammals did not go extinct, there are back scratching posts in homes, they wear special eating gloves rather than using utensils or eating barehanded, etc. This was all great.

The problem with this book was everything not directly about Neanderthal society. Bizarrely, this included almost the entire plotline on Neanderthal World, which consisted of a murder investigation and trial of the missing Neanderthal's male partner (what we would call his husband or lover), which was mostly tedious and ensured that we see very little of Neanderthal society. The Neanderthal interactions on our world were fun, but the non-Neanderthal parts were painful. There is a very graphic, on-page stranger rape of the main female character, solely so she can realize that Neanderthal dude is not like human men. There's two sequels, which I will not read.

It got some pretty entertaining reviews:

"☆☆☆☆☆1 out of 5 stars.
No. JUST NO.
I am sorry, but the premise of inherently and innately peaceful cultures with more advanced technology than conflict-driven cultures is patently absurd. Read Alistair Reynolds' Century Rain for an examination of how technological advancement depends on strife: necessity is the mother of invention, and the greatest necessity of all is fighting for survival. I will not be lectured for my male homosapien hubris by a creature that would never have gotten past the late neolithic in technology."

Hominids won a Hugo! Here are the other nominees.

1st place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
2nd place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)
3rd place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
4th place: The Scar by China Miéville (British)
5th place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)

Amazingly, I have read or attempted to read all of them. My ratings:

1st place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
2nd place: The Scar by China Miéville (British).
3rd place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)
4th place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
5th place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)

If I'd voted, it would be very close between Bones of the Earth and The Scar, both of which I loved. I made a valiant attempt at The Years of Rice and Salt. Like all of KSR's books, I'm sure it's quite good but not for me. I know I read Kiln People but recall literally nothing about it, so I'll give Hominids a place above it for having some nice Neanderthal stuff.

The actual ballot is a complete embarrassment.

(no subject)

Last week I was on vacation at Beth's family cottage, which normally would mean that I'd be reading a battered paperback. HOWEVER instead I was racing to finish Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets due to the unfortunate fact of it being triply overdue at the library.

A useful and worthwhile book; a compelling and depressing book; not, perhaps, an ideal vacation book, but so it goes. The book is composed of oral histories conducted by Alexievich in the years between 1991 and 2012 with various inhabitants of the Former Soviet Union. Alexievich is particularly interested in suicides, and several of the interviews/chapters circulate around people who knew or were close to people who took their own lives after the fall of communism; several others focus on people who were living in areas of the former Soviet Union where the end of the USSR led immediately to ethnic or nationalistic violence.

Many of the oral histories follow a pattern that goes

a. [recounting of an absolutely horrific personal-infrastructural tragedy or example of human cruelty that happened under Stalin]
b. but at least we had ideals
c. And Now We Have This Fucking Capitalism Instead And It's Not A Good Trade

and many others go

a. under socialism in [location] they said we were all brothers and I believed it
b. and suddenly overnight that changed and I will be forever haunted by the things I've seen since

Alexievich recounts the oral histories more or less as if they're dramatic/poetic monologues -- usually monologues of despair -- removing herself and the circumstances under which they were conducted almost entirely, except for a very occasional and startling interjection to make a point. (One oral history, of the horrific-things-happened-but-we-believed variety, is intermittently interrupted by anekdoty from the interviewee's son; Alexievich comments that no matter what she asked him, he only ever responded with a joke.) Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style. As a literary conceit, it's very effective, but I found myself wishing sometimes that it was a little less literary. It's rare that I read a nonfiction book and want the author to be putting more of themself into the narrative, rather than less, but I wanted to know what questions she was asking. That said, for various reasons, I'm considering buying a copy.

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Manners makyth monarkz

I was madly irked yesterday to come across this in a report in The Times on classism at Oxbridge (surprise surprise NOT, surely, that is where one would expect to find it in its native haunts?):

'being offered “lessons in manners” after picking up the wrong spoon at a formal college dinner.'

a) I do not think deployment of cutlery comes under the heading of 'manners', unless, as in, was it The Lion in Winter or some forgotten Arthurian epic, somebody takes these here newfangled forks to be instruments of assassination. Or maybe starts flicking soup across the table with improvised spoon trebuchets. Providing that we're at the Norbert Elias Civilising Process stage of using cutlery rather than our fingers, anyway.

Wot do they even teach them at Oxbridge these days, eh?

b) Okay, people do weaponise manners, but essentially, manners are supposed to be about making people feel comfortable and at ease, and if you're picking on somebody for not knowing some niche culturally-specific rule relating to spoons, that is Bad Manners and RUDE.

Cite here to Cardinal Newman on The Gentleman:

The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at his ease and at home.

And a story that I was told in childhood about Queen Victoria, which when I look it up, has also been ascribed to QEII and now to His current Maj, about seeing a guest, unacquainted with fingerbowls, drink from theirs, and doing the same, so as not to show them up.

So I am pretty sure this is Totally Apocryphal, or else it was actually done by somebody who Was Not Queen V or even royal, but it is a story about Proper Behaviour.

GB Stern - not sure whether this is in her 'rag-bag chronicles' or one of the novels or maybe even both - mentions Mittel-European landowner lady who, when dining her tenants, deliberately spills glass of wine on the tablecloth herself, right at the beginning of the meal, to set them at ease.

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reading Wednesday

Just Finished:. Gifts by Ursula LeGuin, the first of the Annals of the Western Shore. A re-read, but it had been probably 15 years since I first read it, so it was good to visit again. Such creativity, such a wonderful voice, such marvelous characters, even if so much of the content is grim (as it involves using supernatural gifts for power and violence). Good stuff.

Now reading: Voices, the 2nd of the Annals. And The Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer, on audio. This one is remarkably charming and I am definitely enjoying it.

Up next: The Scarlet Pimpernel, for book club (on audio from Librivox), and Powers, the finale of the Annals of the Western Shore.

****

Today I was in a meeting with many people from around the organization, strategizing on how to spend $100M, and there were 10 people on the call and I was the only woman. Joy.

I had takeout Thai on Sunday when I hosted two friends, and ended up with a small container of leftover peanut sauce. So tonight I mixed it with extra olive oil, garlic, rice vinegar, and peanut butter, and stretched it enough to make it into salad dressing. Very tasty! I recommend.

In a few minutes I have to get up and make a tray of dessert for the division summer BBQ on Friday. I think I shall probably make these.

Work is entirely out of control. Apparently I could ask for OT for some of this work but I just cannot bring myself to do any more than I have the time to do in a 40-hour week. And if not enough gets done, well, that's just not my problem.

Nonfiction and Wednesday

I'm 2 episodes into s2 and I think I'm going to have to stop. She's not funny, she's not punching up, she's just selfish and mean. I think this might be the showrunners having no theory of how the Addamses fit into a larger supernatural universe. Sigh. On to Alien: Earth!

Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland: In South Dakota, people largely welcomed missiles but landowners often didn’t like giving up their land for them (NIMBYism for weapons of mass destruction). Heefner also tracks the persistence of antinuclear protest once it got started, and she makes the point that one reason the lack of success didn’t stop the hardcore protestors was religious faith—protest was an act of sacrifice and witness even if it didn’t have worldly effects.

Nathan Bomey, Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back: Newsy-ish account of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Bomey really doesn’t like unions; he’s more neutral about the interests of lender-creditors.

Grant Faulkner, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story: Paean to the affordances of flash fiction, including drabbles and six-word stories, with exercises. Interesting read.

Tiya Miles, Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits: Another attempt to reconstruct a history of people who were mostly spoken about in the records we have. I didn’t think the speculation about what they felt and thought was very helpful, but it was a useful reminder that there was an active slave trade in Indians in the area for a long time, as well as African/African-American slavery. Michigan was supposedly free territory after the Northwest Ordinance, but that didn’t mean that slavery disappeared (despite opportunities that many took to cross borders to change status).

Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015: The premise here is that the disaster didn’t start in 2005. Most of the book is pre-hurricane explanations of why the city was so vulnerable. Greed and racism play their roles.

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution: Schama focuses on loyalist African-Americans who were forced out to Canada and then to Sierra Leone. While most whites were indifferent to their fate and willing to violate the promises that the Crown had made during the Revolutionary War, a few took their duties seriously, which is how the transitions were made. The first elected black government, and the first women voting for that government, was in Sierra Leone (though a subsequent white guy sent to replace the good one removed women’s ability to vote). It’s beautifully written as well as interesting.

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Wednesday did some bits and bobs of life admin

What I read

Finished The Folded Sky - v good.

Read Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right (2025) - critical essays, bit of a mixed bag, mostly v good, some just not ringing my bell.

On the go

And then it was back to Lanny: Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest (The Lanny Budd Novels Book 6) (1945). Gripping.

Up Next

Well, if I don't go straight on to A World to Win, and maybe I could do with a bit of a break, over the weekend two of the rather minor late Thirkells which have recently been republished as ebooks were marked down on Kobo, so maybe for a change of pace?

Also, have not yet got to latest Literary Review.

PSA: talking of bargains on Kobo, Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb is currently £1.99. Strongly recommend.

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The Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

( Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.

(no subject)

on the one hand, feels very important to write & share writing; on the other, intense need to not be perceived!

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Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn

Zoe Ardelay and her father have lived in exile in a small village since he, a former courtier, had an argument with the king. At the opening of the book, her father has just died of natural causes. Then Darien, the king's advisor, shows up and announces that Zoe has been chosen as the king's fifth wife. Zoe, immersed in the drifting, passive phase of grief, sets out with him for the capital city she hasn't seen since she was a child. The story does not go in any of the expected directions after that, starting with the conveyance they use to get there: a new invention, a gas-powered automobile.

This small-scale fantasy is the first of five "Elemental Blessings" books, but stands alone. It does end up involving the politics and rulership of a country, but it's mostly the story of one woman, how her life changes after her father dies, and the relationships she has with the people she meets. It's got great characters and relationships, focuses on small but meaningful moments in a very pleasing manner, and has outstandingly original worldbuilding. Most of it is not set in court, and involves ordinary poor and middle-class people and settings. The vibe is reminiscent of early Robin McKinley.

Welce, the country it's set in, has two aspects which are crucial to both plot and character, and are interestingly intertwined. They may seem complicated when I explain them, but they're extremely easy to follow and remember in the actual book.

The first aspect is a system of elemental beliefs and magic, similar to a zodiac. The elements are water, air, fire, earth, and wood. Every person in the country is associated with one of those elements, which is linked with personality characteristics, aptitudes, aspects of the human body, and, occasionally, magic. This is all very detailed and cool - for instance, water is associated with blood, wood with bone, and so forth. We've all seen elemental systems before, but Shinn's is exceptionally well-done. The way the elemental system is entwined with everyday life is outstanding.

How do people know which element is theirs? Here's where we get to the second system, which I have never come across before. Temples, which are not dedicated to Gods but to the five elements, have barrels of blessings - coins marked with symbols representing blessings like intelligence, change, courage, joy, and so forth. Each blessing is associated with an element. People randomly pull coins for both very important and small occasions, to get a hint of what way they should take or, upon the birth of a child, to get three blessings that the child will keep for life. The blessings a child gets may or may not show their element - if they don't, it becomes clear over time based on personality.

The blessings are clearly genuinely magical and real, but often in subtle ways. I loved the blessings and the way they work into the story is incredibly cool. Same with the elements. Zoe's element is water, and her entire plot has a meandering quality which actually does feel like a water-plot, based on the qualities ascribed to water in the book.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes small-scale, character-based fantasy AND to anyone who likes cool magic systems or worldbuilding. It's not quite a cozy fantasy but it has a lot of cozy aspects. I can see myself re-reading this often.

There are five books, one for each element. I've since read the second book, Royal Airs. It's charming and enjoyable (and involves primitive airplanes, always a bonus) but doesn't quite have the same lightning in a bottle quality of Troubled Waters.

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Things which are gratifying

People reading one's work.

People citing one's work.

People buying one's books.

People writing articles (or really, any research thing) based on a small part of an archive one catalogued back in the day (somebody should have had a word about archival citation practices, though).

Finding that one has after some moaning, groaning, and struggle, got a paper with something that is a bit of a counter-intuitive discovery, based on just going back to the notes made during that research trip.

Appointment Week

I have:

* 3 appointments tomorrow, all remote (for later today versions of "tomorrow", because I rarely get to sleep before midnight)
* 2 appointments Wednesday
* Only one appointment Thursday, but it looks like a doozy
* The morning primary care adjacent appointment on Wednesday got scheduled today (Monday) by using the magic combination of phrases "my oncologist said" and "new lump"
* (it's probably a ganglion cyst, since I have a history of those going back to the 1980s)

And then I managed to drive myself to Pained Noises & a complete lack of energy today by:
* ( Read more... )

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

cynthia1960!

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Well, they did make a slight change

I recently went slightly spare at the blurb for the reprint of an obscure (if interesting for non-literary reasons) dystopian work of the 1920s (on which I have writ myself in chapter of volume of which I have lately received my advance copy) as describing someone in a rather misleading fashion -

- and looking at it this evening I see that they have very slightly tweaked it.

But on reflection, why, in the first place, are they mentioning the HUSBAND of the author and their ideological position (which I will still contend was a whole lot MOAR COMPLIK8ED than they want to make it)?

(Possibly, over here, just a slight touch of the miffs that, if they are doing a line of dystopian works of the period in question, Y U NO ask meeeeeee to do critical intro to any of them?)

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fandom

Fic anniversary

It was on August 11, 1999, that I (terrified, heart pounding, with a newly chosen pseudonym that I wasn't even quite sure I liked) hit Send on the message that put a Sentinel PWP called "Anoint" out on the SXF mailing list.

(This is really not meant to encourage anybody to go read that story, because I put it on AO3 for what felt like historical reasons, but I do not in any way think it's GOOD.)

I'm still happy to be here.[waves at old and new friends]

....!!!

https://comicbook.com/anime/news/homestuck-animated-series-hazbin-hotel-creators/

From the little I've absorbed about Hazbin Hotel, the creators might just be the correct kind of disturbed to do justice to Homestuck.

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cooking,
recipes

Culinary

This week's bread: the Collister/Blake My Favourite Loaf, strong white/wholemeal/einkorn flour, turned out v nice.

Friday night supper: grocery delivery came so early that I had time to whip up dough, etc, for sardegnera (with Calabrian salami).

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, with Marriage's Light Spelt Flour. I think the current mace is a bit underpowered? I thought I had sprinkled on a fair amount but it didn't really come through.

Today's lunch: smoked haddock with butter beans - using Belazu Judion Butter Beans since actual dried butter beans are still being hard to come by - the haddock seemed a bit bland? - maybe I need to add further seasoning when mingling the poached fillets and the beans; served with slowcooked tenderstem broccoli (not bad considering it boiled dry a couple of times), and the whomping adult courgettes I was sent instead of baby ones (at least they weren't actual vegetable marrows) cut into batons and white-braised with sliced red bell pepper.

Another volume in prospect

Your amanuensis is pleas'd to announce that Volume 24 of Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, Connexions: Widening Circles, is now available for pre-order, and will be publisht in form electronickal and as a handsome bound volume, on 29th of this month:

Several problems persist in troubling the circle around Clorinda, Dowager Marchioness of Bexbury. It is feared that there may be further adverse repercussions from the Hackwold Incident, while Baron Fendersham continues to linger in Town although Lady Wauderkell has taken retreat in a convent. New acquaintances are drawn into the circle, and new contacts flourish. Certain difficulties are unexpectedly resolved, while unanticipated trials arise.