Sorry to have been silent for a while here. Sadly, a close friend of ours passed away suddenly and we have been dealing with the aftermath. However, my partner is off tomorrow on a trip with his family for two weeks, and I, lonely and sad as I am likely to be, will probably pass some of that time by writing about a slew of interlibrary loan books and new acquisitions.
After researching and adding some new names to the Overwhelming List recently, I couldn't resist tracking down titles by a couple of them. So I am looking forward to reading Hilda Vaughan's novella A Thing of Nought, Elma Napier's Duet in Discord (written under the pseudonym Elizabeth Garner), Margiad Evans' Country Dance (don't ask me what the sticker of the fish tale on the spine of the library's copy could be meant to indicate--you could ask California State University, Long Beach, but as it appears this book hasn't been checked out in a couple of decades, would even they know???), and Eiluned Lewis' The Captain's Wife. It will be an orgy of reading of writers I'd never heard of until recently, and what could be more fun than that?
I also recently picked up Dorothy Evelyn Smith's Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which I had in my notes because it was suggested at a Possibly Persephone event a year or two ago. I thought the plot sounded interesting (a spinster, Miss Penny, thwarts the attempted suicide of a young woman, Miss Plum, and then finds that Miss Plum is disrupting her orderly life a bit too much), but I was a bit ambivalent about it because fellow blogger Lizbeth gave it a lukewarm review. I actually liked it a lot (though I also completely see where Lizbeth was coming from in her critiques), and I found it made me think about "cozy" fiction and writers who may intentionally thwart its expectations. (Apparently "thwart" is my word for the day...)
In fact, I liked MPAMP so much that I promptly ordered used copies of two more Dorothy Evelyn Smith titles, Lost Hill and The Lovely Day. I'm finishing Lost Hill today, if all goes according to plan, and it's quite different from MPAMP, so I'm looking forward to writing about both.
So if there are any readers out there for this blog, don't give up on me yet! I'll be back soon.
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