#TBRChallenge – Getaway: A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson

A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson is, I believe, the last of her adult novels that I had left to read. My profound thanks for this journey go to Kelly Link, who recommended the author to me roughly two decades ago.

A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson was a delight from end to end, even the sad parts, which given it’s set just before and during World War Two, with a glimpse afterwards, is a mighty accomplishment. It’s set primarily in England and in Austria.

The book opens this way: In a way they were born to be aunts. Emancipated, eccentric and brave, the Norchester sisters lived in a tall grey house in Bloomsbury, within a stone’s throw of the British Museum.

The heroine, Ellen, is the daughter a suffragette who shares a house in London with her two sisters; her father died in World War One. Her mother and aunts envision great things for her, but Ellen wants something quite different; she wants to be a homemaker, in the most profound sense of the word. It was of course all right for children to help servants: servants after all were a kind of underclass and should have been liberated except that it wasn’t easy to see how to run a house without them. But it soon became clear that Ellen enjoyed making beds and polishing the grate and setting fires.

In 1937, Ellen goes to work as the housekeeper/house mother for a school in Austria, run by an English Shakespeare scholar and housed in a decaying pink castle. This whole section is delightful, because Ellen makes the school a home and uncovers the children’s personalities; she also meets Marek, the mysterious and attractive gardener, who has more going on than is visible on the surface. Ellen is beloved by most of the school for her kindness and helpfulness; part of her homemaking is fostering the selfhood of the children, and some of the staff as well. Her story is one of love and support, which rewards her emotionally. Meanwhile, Marek’s story is one of danger and pain from the emerging Nazi threat in Europe; he is in hiding at the school, while working against fascism, his true self crushed inside of himself.

Of course, Ellen and Marek are romantically attracted; opposite personalities yield terrific romance plots. But their journey isn’t easy; this 1997 novel’s plot harks back in some ways to the sweeping historical romances of the 1970s, in which the protagonists are swept apart and reunited, separated again, and only reunited after great suffering. Don’t let that stop you. The story is beautiful and the happy ending decisively well-earned.

I read Magic Flutes in 2021, if you’re looking for an Ibbotson book which is a bit more lighthearted throughout.

Posted in historical fiction, reading, romance novels | Tagged | 2 Comments

My January Reading Log

Fiction:
Aftermath: Tides Turning (Clorinda Cathcart’s Circle Book 18) by L. A. Hall started my year off right with a check-in on old friends. I loved how the younger generation was taking up the slack to subtly change things for the better.

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

Fanfiction:
Strange-Eyed Constellations by kaydeefalls was the sort of unexpected crossover I love: The Old Guard, movie version, with Star Trek, reboot movie version. By this point in their future, Andromache the Scythian has died but Quynh has been reunited with the others. They’ve all served in Starfleet in previous lifetimes, but currently are working independently, Nile and Booker in Space, Nicky and Joe and Quynh on Earth…until they begin dreaming of a new immortal, a Vulcan woman. I would read lots more of this crossover if it became a series!

firecracker, firecracker, sparkling in the sky by basketofnovas (slashmarks) for etothey is an AU of Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, in which Lessa of Ruatha Hold impresses a bronze dragon while Kylara impresses the queen dragon, Ramoth. The two end up as the new Weyrleaders. I wanted a lot more of this story; it ends with the mating flight.

King of the Clouds by rayemars is the most unusual Check Please! story I’ve ever read; set among the Las Vegas Aces, it’s from the point of view of a Ukrainian player nicknamed Scrappy, a dreamwalker who gets drawn into Kent Parsons’ dreams. There are elements of psychological horror. It explores homophobia and harassment from an interesting angle.

More Than a Murderbot by pineapplesquid crosses over Martha Wells’ Murderbot series with Queer Eye. Ameena has recommended Murderbot for a makeover. This is incredibly sweet, and good about consent issues.

need a little angel sitting on my shoulder by napricot is a small-town Christmas romance with a touch of mystery, featuring Bucky Barnes and Sarah Wilson.

The Way of Conquest by pagination is an AU of The Mandalorian, in which Din and Grogu accidentally get thrown back in time and kill Senator Palpatine in the process. Hilarity ensues, some related to bureaucracy, some related to a tiny Yoda-creature’s eating habits.

Queer Omens by Lurlur crosses over the reality show Queer Eye with the television version of Good Omens. Post-Armageddon-that-wasn’t, Crowley kidnaps the Fab 5 who don’t make over Aziraphale’s bookstore, but do help the angel and the demon with relationship issues.

A Lifetime of After by Casloveshisfreckles is both a crossover and an alternate universe. The Fab 5 makes over Castiel Novak, a board game designer, who was nominated by his best friend and roommate, elementary school teacher Dean Winchester. This is also a romance. There are no Supernatural elements other than characters.

Queer Eye for the Staten Guy by lousy_science features Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I’ve seen maybe a couple of episodes of that show, from early on in its run, but I was able to follow the story anyway. Sonny recently received his law degree, but his loving Italian-American family says he’s been distant from them since, and hasn’t wanted to celebrate his achievement. Sonny, meanwhile, has been dealing with several emotional issues, which the Fab 5 help him to overcome. There’s an epilogue in which he gets together with the person he’s been crushing on.

Queer Eye for the Spider Guy by sahiya is also both a crossover and an alternate universe. Tony Stark survives Thanos and has become even more of a father figure to Peter Parker, whose identity has recently become public now that he’s a PhD student at NYU. Peter’s having trouble balancing his Spiderman duties with everything else, which led to his breakup with MJ, and finds it difficult to accept help from his loved ones, even his Aunt May. The Fab 5 help Peter to go from “Spider-mess to his Spider-best!” This one is adorable.

Queer Eye For the Science Guy by heyjupiter features Bruce Banner, who lives in Avengers Tower after helping fight off the Chitauri invasion. Bruce only has two pairs of trousers, all his t-shirts used to belong to Tony Stark, and he forgets to leave the building for weeks at a time. The Fab 5 have their work cut out for them…plus they want to know what’s up with the Science Bros relationship. I loved this one as well.

Posted in alternate universe, crossover, fanfiction, historical fiction | Tagged | Comments Off on My January Reading Log

Welcome to Refuge!

This is the official website of writer Victoria Janssen, author of A Place of Refuge, is science fiction #hopepunk following three former guerillas who lose their fight against a fascist empire but escape to a utopian planet. They’re figuring out what’s next with the aid of pastries, therapy, and other people. A Place of Refuge is now available in an omnibus edition with extras. New! Dissenter Rebellion: The Rattri Extraction, a Refuge prequel.

Victoria is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and serves on the Romance Steering Committee.

You can also find these novellas at Goodreads, StoryGraph, and LibraryThing.

Email: victoriajanssen@victoriajanssen.com.

Social Media:
Goodreads.
Bluesky.
Romancelandia at Mastodon.
Wandering Shop at Mastodon.
Tumblr.
Facebook Author Page.

Last update: 01 October 2023.

Posted in writing | Comments Off on Welcome to Refuge!

I Heart SapphFic Reading Challenge Week 4: Spaceship / Space Station

Finding Refuge is featured this week in the I Heart SapphFic Reading Challenge Week 4: Spaceship / Space Station!

I’ll be visiting the I Heart SapphFic Reader Group on Facebook on and off all week, and will be giving away a free ebook.

Details of the Reading Challenge.

Cover of Finding Refuge by Victoria Janssen: pale blue background featuring a beautiful Black woman with a shaved head looking pensive. there is a spaceship in the background.

Posted in lesbian, lgbtqia+, promo, sf/f | Tagged | Comments Off on I Heart SapphFic Reading Challenge Week 4: Spaceship / Space Station

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

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 made together. Her father dies after a long illness. Her mother dies in an accident; her grief is a possible contributor. All of this occurs in the first chapter, so it’s not a surprise that Morgan decides to go and live in the enormous house left to her in her mother’s will, a house that until recently had been occupied by a religious order.

Morgan can see that she is not human. It is clear. She has kept the external shell, but everything has been scraped out, there is a void there, an alien void, outer space made internal, and she wonders whether she will ever have the courage, or energy, to explore it.

The book is set in Western Canada in the near future. Morgan spends her inheritance making the house livable, and then takes several boarders, including her Delany, her close friend from college, an artist who has a genetic disorder and uses a wheelchair. Soon others move in, but then the plot shifts when aliens come to Earth, deliver a message, and then leave their bodies behind to be brought up as humans and then recovered by their alien compatriots. Needing a job and answering an advertisement for adult childcare, Morgan unexpectedly ends up working with the alien who’s being held in Canada, whom she calls Blue. Morgan begins to educate Blue, who swiftly advances in vocabulary and behavior, but the plot shifts more than once from a sort of First Contact science fiction to include aspects of suspense, romance, murder mystery, and literary fiction.

A Paradigm of Earth is, in my opinion, a much more complex and more experimental novel than Dorsey’s first, Black Wine. It’s difficult to sum up, so I won’t try, but I’m glad I finally pulled it off the TBR shelf!

Posted in glbtqia+, reading, sf/f | Tagged | 1 Comment

My December Reading Log

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 and Jasmina’s in-laws. They’re also both dealing with changes, both pleasant and difficult, that come from entering a new stage of life; they’re learning what they want to keep, and what they want to let go.

You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo is space opera about a group of former soldiers trying to make a new life for themselves with a restaurant on the edge of known space; but their life is interrupted by a vengeful pirate from their captain’s past, and possibly shaped by the forces of destiny. From the description of this book, which mentioned “The Great British Bakeoff,” I’d expected a lot more lighthearted hijinks than it actually contained. I enjoyed it, but a massive disaster and a harrowing death about halfway through took me by surprise. The worldbuilding is excellent, featuring all sorts of aliens including a plant being and a squid-like being with symbiotic elements. I could see this story being made into television very easily.

Nonfiction:

My TBR Challenge book for December was Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub, about the 1914 World WAr One Christmas truce.

Fanfiction:
The One Where They’re Stars on HGTV by earlgreytea68 is an absolutely massive alternate universe romance series focusing on Arthur and Eames from the movie Inception. You do not need to have seen the movie to read the series, though there are amusing references to the movie here and there. The setup is simple. Arthur is a real estate agent; Eames is an interior designer. They star in a television show called “Love It or Leave It” in which they compete to offer couples either a new house or a fabulous renovation of their current house. Eames and Arthur become romantically involved. Third in the series is “Next Big Thing,” in which they take a job as judges on a reality show for aspiring designers; a late replacement for the third judge turns out to be an ex-lover of Eames, another design show host named Alec Hart, who’s determined to further his career by any means necessary. Despite the conflicts driven by Hart, the story is fairly low-key as the relationship between Arthur and Eames is never in doubt. Their on-screen relationship begins to spark social media response, which they learn to deal with, and they begin to think about what sort of future they want to have. Judging from the author’s comments throughout, this story had a live following as it was being posted, much like the imaginary reality show; the commenters affected the show’s challenges and outcome, which is so fun.

Fox on the Run by avocadomoon is a Bucky Barnes story that veers off before The Falcon and The Winter Soldier series; with the assistance of Pepper Potts and a civil rights lawyer, Bucky goes into hiding. Once there, he encounters former Black Widow Melina Vostokoff (who appears in the Black Widow movie) and Clint Barton, comics version rather than MCU version. I enjoyed this because it was a new angle on Bucky’s post-escape characterization, and did not involve him joining the Avengers. There are some possibly triggering references related to the Red Room and its abuse of young female trainees as well as the usual Winter Soldier angst.

Posted in alternate universe, fanfiction, romance novels | Tagged | Comments Off on My December Reading Log

#TBRChallenge 2023

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.

Behold my list for 2023!

January 18 – Starting Over
A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey.

February 15 – Getaway
A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson.

March 15 – Baggage
My Father’s Ghost by Suzy McKee Charnas.

April 19 – Unusual Historical
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark.

May 17 – Freebie (Publication date June 6, 2023)
The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar.

June 21 – Love Is Love
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.

July 19 – Opposites Attract
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys.

August 16 – Tropetastic!
Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell.

September 20 – New Author
Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson.

October 18 – Danger Zone
A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker.

November 15 – Once Upon A Time…
Spear by Nicola Griffith.

December 20 – Festive
Coming Home for Christmas by Carla Kelly.

TBR Challenge posts from previous years.

Posted in reading | Tagged | Comments Off on #TBRChallenge 2023

#TBRChallenge – Festive: Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub

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 unofficial “Christmas Truce” is usually referred to as a beautiful thing, but to me, it’s always been both beautiful and terrible, highlighting the irrationality of war. For a day or two, up and down the Western Front, whole sections of the opposing armies agreed not to shoot at each other, sang back and forth from their trenches, and met in No Man’s Land to bury their dead, shake hands, chat, and exchange food, drink, tobacco, and uniform souvenirs such as badges and buttons. Some of them took down addresses, to write to each other after the war (I wondered if any of those men later ended up killing each other). There were makeshift football matches and bicycle races and concerts. Then the fighting and killing began again, and continued until November 11, 1918. There were no further informal truces of that extent.

What if we could always just stop? Stop fighting, stop killing, just go on strike against war? But we don’t. It’s horrible that we don’t.

In general, the Germans initiated the truce, ironic given that the Germans had initiated the war by invading neutral Belgium. The German troops at the front in December 1914 were mostly Saxon and Bavarian conscripts, not career soldiers, who set up lighted Christmas trees on their trench parapets. The English volunteers were skeptical at first but joined in. The book focuses on those two armies, but mentions French and Indian troops who also participated, and briefly describes those who were wholly against the truce, from all ranks and nationalities. The author researched materials including letters, newspapers, and regimental histories as well as a few fictionalized accounts written later. The research is Eurocentric, almost all either English or German sources.

It seems to have started this way: venturing out of their trenches under makeshift white flags, officers (for the most part) arranged an interval to bury their dead, some of whom had been lying in No Man’s Land for months at that point. Imagine that; imagine the state of those bodies after months lying in the knee-deep mud, decaying and gnawed by rats; imagine that those corpses were men you knew, your friends and comrades. I don’t think the later meetings, exchanges, and games would have been possible without first burying those dead men. I think that having the bodies out of sight, when they’d been constantly visible for months, must have imparted a sense of a clean slate to the general atmosphere; a way to fool yourself into a momentary peace.

Many of the first person accounts refer to a sense of wonder at the beauty of lights and music instead of artillery, and surprise that their enemies were just humans. I wish that we could always have that beauty and wonder.

The truces ended, as they had begun, in fits and starts up and down the line, sometimes on formal agreement, sometimes when new troops rotated from the rear to the front lines and resumed shooting. Some soldiers did attempt to resist returning to fighting, by shooting into the air (not safe! don’t try it!) or over the heads of their enemies, but their officers, or the officers above their officers, soon put a stop to such small rebellions.

The war continued. Millions died. Our conflicts now, over a century later, are mostly smaller in scale, but no less brutal and horrifying. Will war ever end, or is peace only ever temporary? It’s something for me to think about as the year turns, and I once again work on mustering up hope for humanity’s future.

Posted in nonfiction, wwi | Tagged | 2 Comments

My November Reading Log

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 the Charles Lenox series; I had read one previous installment, much earlier in the continuity. I don’t think it’s necessary to be familiar with the series to enjoy the book; this one felt very different from the other one I read in both tone and plot.

Repercussions: Deceptive Disguises by L. A. Hall is seventeenth in the Clorinda Cathcart’s Circle series, and I need to start referring to family trees as there are now many more characters that there were in the original series! This is all to the good. I love this series because it always leans towards maximum felicity, plus there’s the soothing familiarity of characters I’ve spent many pleasant hours with.

My #TBRChallenge book for November was The Conductors by Nicole Glover.

Fanfiction:
I live next door to a haunted bookshop owned by an immortal cryptid bastard. AMA! by kyaticlikestea is basically Reddit crossed over with Good Omens, TV edition. It’s hilarious. Crowley as a Redditor is delightful.

brilliant (like a confession) by kathkin explores how it might go if Lois figures out she’s in love with Clark Kent, and Clark feels obligated to reveal his secret identity as Superman. This friends-to-lovers story gave me a new way of looking at how and why Clark is able to hide his secret identity in plain sight.

He Won’t Tell You That He Loves You by hellshandbasket is House/Wilson slash that takes place after House detoxes from Vicodin and is living with Wilson while he recovers. It’s a friends-to-lovers domesticity story. House has been denying his love for his best friend for years, and has to diagnose his own feelings. Meanwhile, Wilson’s being patient. Mostly. I enjoyed this one for the banter and the diagnosis angle, which fits in so well with the character.

The Constellation of Touch by what_alchemy is sweet Matt Murdock/Foggy Nelson slash set at Christmas, but the most excellent part is Matt’s answers to Foggy’s questions about his enhanced senses; a lot of great worldbuilding there.

Be As You’ve Always Been by gyzym is a delightful post-Good Omens tv story in which Aziraphale is slowly coming to understand his feelings about Crowley, their long history together, and his existence as an angel. There’s romance but also growing self-knowledge, and some Discworld crossover as well. It’s a lovely story.

The Edge Between the Sand and the Stars by rain_sleet_snow veers off canon after Star Wars: The Force Awakens, following Rey’s journey as she connects romantically with Finn and Poe as well as searching for her birth family, all while training to be a Jedi and fighting a war against the First Order and the Knights of Ren. I spent most of a week reading this and enjoying how thoughtfully her emotional journey was depicted.

Something Dumb to Do by poisonivory is a very sweet Matt Murdock/Foggy Nelson romance featuring fake marriage and friends-to-lovers tropes. My favorite part was the depiction of Foggy’s family.

Posted in fanfiction, mystery | Tagged | Comments Off on My November Reading Log

#TBRChallenge – Lies: The Conductors by Nicole Glover

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 stories she and her husband Benjy are told about the murders.

“Where do you think my stories come from?”

“You heard them in the quarters and at your mother’s side as you shelled peas. You collected them from old aunties and uncles with more dreams than memories of African kingdoms. And most of all, you gathered them from the fancies of others wanting nothing more than to pass the time.”

“That’s one part,” Hetty murmured, “and it’s a very small part. A story is a living creature, and they need a personal touch to live on. You breathe in your woes, your loves, your troubles, and eventually they become something new. They aren’t the books you love so much. Stories change with the tellers.”

The Conductors is historical fantasy set soon after the American Civil War; the protagonists are formerly enslaved people who now work as amateur detectives in Philadelphia, among the Black community there. Magic is common, but in this world’s version of Jim Crow laws, people of color are forbidden from learning or using certain methods of using magic, for instance the use of wooden wands. Before Emancipation, enslaved people with magic were used by their enslavers and kept in check via the use of punishing collars that inhibited their abilities, not all that different from limitations imposed upon enslaved people and their talents in our world.

The details of the magic systems, wands versus nature and stars, were well thought out, both complex and thematically meaningful. The plot flowed very quickly. The murder mystery begins with a body found in an alley. Hetty and Benjy realize they have to search among their friends and acquaintances for the truth, and along the way they uncover more than they’d imagined. I won’t spoil the mystery here; I did guess the guilty party eventually, but not until close to the end. For me, guessing the murderer has nothing to do with how much I enjoy the journey!

The thing I wanted more of was a sense of place. I live in Philadelphia, and have some knowledge of the historical community depicted in the book, at least the real world version. I used to live in that area of the city and regularly read the historic markers. I had been hoping for a lot more sensory detail and specificity about locations and institutions; instead, the setting felt very bland, a background but not a character in itself, if that makes sense. For example, I am pretty sure the church and cemetery that figure into the plot were created for the book, which is fine, but felt very neutral; when real locations are mentioned, there isn’t a lot of detail. Obviously, the setting of this book is an alternate universe, so the Philadelphia with people using magic is not the same as the one I live in. But I would have liked to see the Black history of my city celebrated to a greater extent. This might have been a conscious choice to separate the story from real people and their lives, of course.

Incidentally, here’s the Historic Philadelphia Burial Places Map if you’re interested – there’s a lot of concern in Philadelphia about burial places that were utterly destroyed by developers, especially in the first half of the twentieth century.

Anyway! Wanting more of a book I enjoyed is always a good thing. I love the characters and the lowkey romance and the twisty plot. I’m looking forward to the sequel.

Posted in philadelphia, sf/f | Tagged | 1 Comment