Have been to Massachusetts east and west, and met internet friends older and newer, and it was fantastic.  Did not manage to read LJ/DW at all while away, and probably won't catch up now, so any ignoring of newses is completely unintentional.

This is definitely the fast and dirty way to do this, but I will attempt to clean up later: I need to know ( Read more... )

When working on the Arthur chapter of the History Book - which is totally steepholm's baby, BTW* it occurred to me that it would be nice to have a couple of books that didn't have any mention of Arthur to set against the ones we were discussing. Not just out of the pool of all books in the world that are not in any way Arthurian, obviously. What we were ( Read more... )

Wrapped was both the weirdest coincidence of the Challenge, and the biggest disappointment. The coincidence was that brandy-painter and I both started reading it just before bed on Saturday night, getting approximately the same amount read before going to sleep. It was the biggest disappointment, not because I disliked it most of the books I read (it didn't ( Read more... )

... or perhaps the not so great anything.

It's probably pretty clear by now that this book was not my cup of tea. There was no more fat-bashing, after that first chapter, but that might have been because we were in the company of figures of lofty birth (although they themselves often don't know it), elves, priestesses of the Order -- y'know, ( Read more... )

...but this isn't a rant. Not really. No, I meant it's really not! Really. I'm beyond confused by the Lady Grace Mysteries, and would love a bit of input, by anyone who has read them, or read Patricia Finney's adult books written either as Patricia Finney or as P.F. Chilholm -- or who just feels like speculating as to what on earth might be ( Read more... )

...and our young protagonist has OCD and is self-harming ( Read more... )

Well, despite another trip to A&E, which was very quick and very useless, one to the GP, which involved a life-threatening entry and exit for the crutch-bound Becca, and one to the hospital joint & bone clinic (don't think the J&BC would have been explanatory enough) which was extremely long and very painful, a total of 6 taxi trips, 8 x-rays and ( Read more... )

Beswitched is a recently-published book by Kate Saunders, and I saw several recommendations for it which made it clear that it was a have-to-get-hold-of, for the History Project if nothing else. The premise was fantastic: time swap with the present-day protagonist ending up in a boarding school in 1935. That I didn't love it as much as others ( Read more... )

One of the questions that steepholm and I are looking at in The History Book is a potential problem for all writers of historical fiction which may be especially acute for writers of children's historical fiction - how to handle the depiction of beliefs widely held in the past and now considered unacceptable. Two ways of dealing with this problem are to ( Read more... )

Serious question, of deep import, coming up.  Children's books set in Roman Britain - with the exception of those written by Rosemary Sutcliff* - seem to be universally Bad.  Sometimes entertainingly so, sometimes just unreadably so.  But why?  (Any good titles disproving this theory would be more than gratefully received, btw!) * [ETA - hafren   ( Read more... )