Not in the Plan by Dana Hawkins

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  • Title: Not in the Plan
  • Author: Dana Hawkins
  • # of Pages: 311

Free-spirited coffee shop owner meets uptight coffee addict. Is an opposites-attract match brewing… or burning?

Crushed under the weight of writer’s block and a looming deadline, Mack escapes from New York to Seattle. She meets Charlie, a beautiful, generous, nearly bankrupt coffee shop owner recovering from heartbreak. For the first time, Mack has a muse. And then Mack starts using Charlie’s private stories in her novel…

When a storm traps Mack and Charlie in the coffee shop, they share a mind-bending, knee-shaking kiss. But Charlie is an eternal optimist who sleeps with fairy-lights on, while Mack is an ironing-at-5am worrier who sleeps with… everyone. They could never turn this chemistry into something real, right?

And if Charlie finds out what Mack has been doing, turning Charlie’s most intimate secrets into a juicy page-turner, will they even have a chance to try?

A swoony, steamy queer romcom perfect for fans of Ashley Herring Blake, Casey McQuiston, and Alexis Hall.

I’ve been having a strange month, reading-wise. Apart from Robert Rankin’s incredible The Fandom of the Operator, I’ve been on an unplanned binge of LGBT books, with Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop, followed by How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow, for which I began writing a review and found myself “just checking out” Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind and reading it all over again cover to cover. I was starting to get a bit tired, and well, it’s quite possible that at 27 I’ve finally fazed out of YA lit.

Luckily, Not in the Plan’s Charlie and Mack are in their mid-twenties (with Mack losing a year somewhere in the middle, note to the editor), out and proud and with full time jobs, and at least some life experience under their belt. The emotional battles each one of them faces are more mature; recently divorced Charlie is working on overcoming childhood trauma to find love without codependency, introverted Mack is scared to love after nearly losing her mother to cancer. Each one also has her own plot line, independent of the other; Charlie is facing bankruptcy and Mack’s publishing deadline is nearing, a deadline for which she’s already been paid an advance, and then used it to cover her mother’s hospital bills, in secret. Not in the Plan alternates between their two points of view.

Charlie was definitely the more developed of the two characters. Her “origin story”, so to speak, was much better laid out, which made her motives as a character a lot more believable. Her plot-line included some heavy topics like codependency and parental abandonment, both of which were responsibly written, through Charlie’s reflections on her own life.

On that note, I do think the story would’ve benefited from aging Mack and Charlie a bit more. Some of their personal reflections seemed a bit premature coming from two twenty-five-ish year olds. Charlie’s divorce in her mid-twenties was also unusual, considering how uncommon getting married young is amongst the queer community. She could’ve just as easily have been described as getting out of a ten-year relationship instead. It would’ve stood out a lot less, and raised fewer questions that were never addressed. On the flip side, Mack’s dynamic with her originally-teen-parent-but-now-in-his-forties dad was a bit too… intimate for me. I can imagine that as a kid, he would’ve been much more like an older brother, and I’m a big fan of Gilmore Girls banter, but when it’s between a woman in her mid-twenties and her adult father, it seems off.

Not in the Plan was also my first ever ARC! Reading a book first is exciting! It also means sometimes what you get isn’t the final_for_real_this_time_v2 version, and in this case there were definitely some bumpy spots. Besides some classic violations of “show, don’t tell”, I found myself wincing at “was hypnotized by her smile and deeply feminine movements”, or physically cringing when Mack said to Charlie “Do you think this affected you as an adult? I’ve researched this stuff for my books but haven’t had this level of conversation before”, right after Charlie shared her childhood trauma. If I’d been Charlie, I would’ve gotten up and left.

And yet, with all of that said and done, I breezed through this book over a single weekend. Despite its shortcomings, Not in the Plan does romance perfectly, with just the right balance of chemistry and conflict to keep you turning the pages and rooting for everyone. A big thanks to NetGalley for giving me a chance to enjoy queer lit without also having to power through that YA teenage angst.

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The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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  • Title: The Thursday Murder Club
  • Author: Richard Osman
  • # of Pages: 377

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?

It’s practically impossible to walk into a bookstore in London without running into a Thursday Murder Club novel within the first five minutes. The first book in the series has been continuously reserved at my library for over six months. When a friend told me I could borrow her copy over the holidays, I took her up on the offer.

As a beach read, The Thursday Murder Club is fantastic. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are fun. In a world where hitting forty means you’re on the brink of death, the eighty year old main character of the Thursday Murder Club is a woman who’s just getting started. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are intelligent, funny and extremely likeable. Joyce’s comments on Waitrose lamb mixed with Lidl rice because “you honestly don’t notice the difference with the basics” made me laugh out loud. Personally, I enjoyed the flip-flop between Joyce’s diary and the third-person narrative, and the writing reminded me of Jonas Jonasson (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared): a mix of deadpan humour, sarcasm and wit. and The standard old-people jokes are still there, such as struggling with Skype or learning about “apps”, but instead of being told at their expense, they’re there to remind us that eighty year-olds can still be curious, and brave and adventurous, i.e. exciting protagonists, even without knowing some of that “trivial” stuff, that “even twelve year olds” these days understand. When Joyce learns about Tinder, she writes: “At least I have discovered that online dating is not for me. You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.”

As a murder mystery, The Thursday Murder Club falls short. While the dynamics between the police and the club, which consist of the former reluctantly cooperating with and then eventually affectionately succumbing to, are actually quite wholesome, no one seems to be doing any detective work at all. The Thursday Murder Club’s investigations amount to the secretive Elizabeth – “I’m not supposed to say what Elizabeth used to do for a living, even though she does go on about it herself at times” – knowing a lot of people in the right places who owe her a lot of favours due to casually referenced tales of interrogations in East Germany, a safe house in Poland and the like. In some places she explains these plot twists to the rest of the gang, and thus to us, and in others we’re expected to take a leap of faith. Unfortunately, leaps of faith generally don’t sit well with investigative novels. In the beginning I tried following along, at some point everyone, including the most sidekick of sidekicks, sounded suspicious, and by the end I just wanted it to end because my head hurt and I had no idea what was going on.

When I sat down to write this review, my premise was this: I liked it, I’m happy I read it, and I think it’s enough Thursday Murder Club for me. However, I just checked the Goodreads reviews for the rest of the series, and people seem to think the second book is just as funny but makes a lot more sense. Next Christmas?

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Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

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  • Title: Red Team Blues
  • Author: Cory Doctorow
  • # of Pages: 224 (ebook)

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.

Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.

Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

I ran across Cory Doctorow’s Kickstarter campaign for Red Team Blues while browsing the website for fun stuff to buy, a bad habit I have when feeling sad. I was never one for window shopping, but I guess now that you can do it sitting down, even I have taken the bait.

I’ve read two Cory Doctorow books in the past year, Little Brother (which I reviewed here), and Radicalized. I’ve been a big fan ever since, so when I saw the campaign I immediately hopped on, without even caring what exactly the story was going to be about. In fact, I actually noticed the plot mentioned blockchain and thought to myself “ooh, maybe with Cory Doctorow’s explanations I’ll finally actually understand”. To me, Little Brother was the perfect ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) intro to cryptography that I needed, bundled into a fast-paced, easy to read story. 

Red Team Blues was not quite that. Actually, Doctorow never meant for it to be that either. How do I know? I asked him! At a fantastic talk he gave in Oxford back in May, I asked him how he decided how much to explain and how much to leave to the reader when it came to the techy bits in his books, and his answer surprised me; paraphrasing here, he said he’d explain things that were of relevance to the story, but that he relied on our access to google for he most part. My surprise was due to the fact that Little Brother had felt extremely descriptive to me, what with its main character being a kid constantly explaining things to others. 

But as I said, Red Team Blues was not like that. I found myself googling quite a bit to get the basics of blockchain and secure keys, although in retrospect most of it wasn’t necessary for the story. In fact, to be perfectly honest, the actual plot twists and even final resolution relied a lot more on mafia-style action rather than tech. While the book was a page turner, mostly due to its easy to read flow, by the time I finished it I didn’t really see how the blockchain background contributed at all. It seemed mainly a way to build background for the main character and give him some fancy monologues. The final punch that solved the problem wasn’t very sophisticated, and I had a hard time understanding why it had taken that long to get there.

As with Little Brother, this book also has an awkward flow at times. In what I assume was an attempt to be diverse, more than once characters are directly described as “Black”, for example “My berth had a view of the lake and a nice Black family next door […]”. While I appreciate Doctorow’s intent since in many cases, when writers choose to not mention race at all, we by default assume everyone is white (until those writers pull a Rowling a decade later), there probably could have been less painfully obvious ways to diversify the cast. 

So, will I read the next one? The answer is still a yes. Red Blue Team has an unusual main character – sixty seven year old Marty Hench. Old white men POVs aren’t unique, but giving them casual, respectful romance stories with women their own age is. Moreover, the idea of forensic accounting is fascinating, and I am holding out some hope that the next book has a bit more tech along with the action. And at the end of the day, Little Brother and Radicalized were fantastic enough to make me a Cory Doctorow fangirl, even if this one was a bit of a miss for me.

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

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  • Title: Little Brother
  • Author: Cory Doctorow
  • # of Pages: 384

Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

In 2012, my mom read Little Brother. She was shocked that a book written about tech in 2008 could still be so relevant four years later. She immediately told me to read it, and I immediately forgot the name. A recent visit to Waterstones jogged our memory and I followed through with the recommendation. Better late than never, as they say. Well, if my mom was shocked in 2012, imagine what I felt in 2022.

The discussion around privacy has matured a lot in recent years, but if there’s one challenge it has yet to conquer, it’s the face-off against security. The sad truth is that when faced with fear, privacy always loses. Little Brother, unlike various articles I’ve read in The New York Times over the years, manages to bring this discussion to life in a way that’s both engaging enough to keep the pages turning and also simple enough to make us realize what’s wrong, and that we really should start caring a bit more.

It’s not intellectual: there’s no “newspeak” or “Thought Police” that we have to “understand” are just “symbols”. It’s not highbrow, no fanciness or frills. Big Brother is The Department of Homeland Security (and if you’re tempted to say it’s all a conspiratorial exaggeration, let’s not forget some modern horror stories), and its main tool is RFID technology, a very real thing we interact with every day, that since reading Little Brother has made me extremely uncomfortable whenever I use my Oyster card. The problems are all very clearly spelled out by Marcus, as he interacts with the adults and kids around him, and his narration even includes explanations for us, the readers, about various mathematical and technological concepts, ranging from Bayesian statistics, public-key cryptography and the false positive paradox and all the way to Internet protocols, SMTP and DNS. It definitely comes at the expense of the writing, and I’ll admit large parts of the book have an awkward flow to them, at times even slightly cringey, but Doctorow is truly gifted when it comes to breaking things down and explaining them in laymen terms, which completely made up for the literary misses for me.

And Little Brother is not just a one-off for Doctorow. A quick visit to his website reveals an extensive body of work about privacy, tech, and privacy and tech (!), which I plan to tackle now that I’ve found someone I can rely on to explain things to me in such an accessible, user-friendly way. And for those of us with a stronger technical background, the bibliography at the end of this book is enough to spawn another TBR list.

I guess the bottom line is this: while it may not be a literary masterpiece, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is important, in a very concrete, tangible way. It’s vital for us as members of a society with tools too powerful for our own good, and not enough powerful people on the right side of things. Do yourself (and myself, and all of ourselves) a favor and check it out (which you can do for free, on Doctorow’s website).

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

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  • Title: A Clockwork Orange
  • Author: Anthony Burgess
  • # of Pages: 141
A Clockwork Orange

“What we were after was lashings of ultraviolence.”

In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy

of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him – but at what cost?

Social prophecy? Black comedy? A study of free will? A Clockwork Orange is all of these. It is also a dazzling experiment in language, as Burgess creates “nadsat”, the teenage slang of a not-too-distant future.

There are quite a few movies I’ve watched purely so that I can stop avoiding the embarrassment of admitting I haven’t. Star Wars is one, Fight Club another. The problem with these kinds of movies is that you’re also not exactly allowed to dislike them. Or rather you are, but you’re clearly in the wrong.

I’d always lumped A Clockwork Orange in with this bunch, and with the additional prerequisite of needing to read the book first, it easily managed to get shoved off the list every year and into the next. It was only last month when I needed to choose a book to take on my visit home, with the single criterion of “as light as possible”, that I decided to give it a go.

At first glance, I couldn’t understand a word. In fact, had I nearly changed my mind about taking it, since I was worried I’d need a dictionary to make it through, and I obviously wasn’t going to have one available. However, a quick Google search made it clear that Google wasn’t going to be of much help either, and I was hooked.

Enough has been said and written (and argued and praised) about the horrific violence of Burgess’s cult classic. It’s not just horrific, it’s also astonishingly random, unjustified violence for the sake of violence. It’s gruesome and detailed and purely unpleasant. Unlike in Nabokov’s Lolita, where the criminal, albeit of a very different nature, soon has the reader empathizing with him, in A Clockwork Orange Alex’s crimes never elicit a feeling of sympathy, or at least that was the case for me. In that respect, it’s interesting to note how the cognitive freedom we associate with books, that let us “imagine beyond our wildest dreams” is also the same cognitive limitation that can protect us in instances like these. Whereas those watching Kubrick’s film would be forced to see these horrible scenes as intimately as their creator wanted them to, readers are protected by the limits of their own mind. Each rape scene was only as horrible as my mind would allow it to be, blurry and removed. I was protected by my imagination, which just refused to conjure up images that I didn’t want to see in detail, or that I didn’t have in detail to begin with. As for the movie, I’ve resolved not to see it.

Another aspect that helped distance the violence throws us back to my dictionary moment of crisis. The book, narrated by Alex, contains many words in a slang argot which Burgess invented especially for it. It’s called Nadsat, a mix of Russian and English, and at first, I simply couldn’t understand a word, so much so that in the first few pages I couldn’t even understand the horrors I was reading. The challenge of figuring out the language quickly captivated me. Burgess has said that he used Nadsat to keep the book from becoming dated, and make Alex’s voice ageless, but I think that by far the greatest result is how immersive the experience becomes for the reader, who needs to truly commit in order to be able to figure out the words and keep up. As I slowly picked it up, I began feeling like a member of some secret club, that I could understand Alex and that not anyone could. It was a story that required effort and dedication, which is not something I’ve come across very often. In fact, it turns out some versions of the book come with a key. Had I been Burgess, I would have had them banned.

As for the ending, well, I’m going to keep this review spoiler-free. We can leave that discussion for the comments, and in this case as well, all that can be said has been said by many others before me. The philosophical aspects of Alex’s reform go right over his head, and so unless you care enough about them, the narration style easily allows you to duck and have them blow right over yours too. It’s probably not the best stylistic choice on Burgess’s part since it makes the psychological and moral questions that could very easily be (and partially are) raised also very easy to ignore. To be quite frank, I didn’t find it very revolutionary either, in a world where conversion therapy is, unfortunately, alive and well. I was so utterly engrossed in the linguistic experience, that for that alone I’ve been recommending it ever since.

I’ve read many great books in my life, with better storylines, better characters, even better writing. But when was the last time a book demanded that I be fully engaged, even devoted, in order to be able to experience its story? I have no idea.

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Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card; A Moral Dilemma

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  • Title: Speaker for the Dead
  • Author: Orson Scott Card
  • # of Pages: 254

In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: the Speaker for the Dead, who told of the true story of the Bugger War.7967

Now long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens’ ways are strange and frightening…again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery… and the truth.

I first read Ender’s Game in 2011. I was (almost) fifteen years old. It was brilliant. And when I closed the book I remember thinking to myself how completely and utterly pointless life is. That feeling was overwhelming, and the memory of it has stuck with me to this day.

Afterwards, it turned out that Orson Scott Card was homophobic. Not just homophobic, but very outspoken about it, and also on the board of directors of the anti-LGBT organization “National Organization for Marriage”. It was very strange to find out that someone who was able to write in a way that affected me so deeply, to truly reach out and touch my heart, was also someone whose personal views were so different from my own. I still find it hard to comprehend how a person whose stories reflect such a deep understanding of humanity and human beings is also a person who, in my opinion, has some serious blind spots.

I found myself grappling with the contradiction, wondering how it should affect my feelings and opinions about the book I loved so much. It’s the age-old question: are an artist’s personal views ever relevant? Should they affect our choices in which art we choose to consume and how? In 2013 I tried to give a fair answer (Reading Is Not Just A Habit But A Way of Life or That Time I Told You Why I Don’t Buy Orson Scott Card Books) so I’ll leave you with that, and with the fact that Card left NOM in 2013, and that when, in 2013, people called for a boycott of the Ender’s Game film, he said “With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.” (source) A quote, by the way, that only further exposed his deep misunderstanding, but that’s for another time.

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Why We Write About Ourselves (edited) by Meredith Maran

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  • Title: Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature
  • Editor: Meredith Maran
  • # of Pages: 254

For the many amateurs and professionals who write about themselves—bloggers, journal-keepers, aspiring essayists, and memoirists—this book offers inspiration, encWhy We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literatureouragement, and pithy, practical advice. Twenty of America’s bestselling memoirists share their innermost thoughts and hard-earned tips with veteran author Meredith Maran, revealing what drives them to tell their personal stories, and the nuts and bolts of how they do it. Speaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these successful authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and least—about writing about themselves.

I love memoirs. Short, long; old, young; essay style or full-fledged story; it doesn’t matter. I read memoirs by people I know and memoirs by people I’ve never heard of (and probably never will again). Sometimes I’m drawn by the story they tell, sometimes I just like their way of telling it. I’m fascinated by the ability to turn a personal experience into a universal one, an experience strangers, who have never met you, want to listen to, even feel a part of. We don’t always have to escape into fiction; sometimes plain old reality already has the brilliant characters and gripping plot. (And let’s all admit it, it’s always exciting to look up these people on Facebook afterwards and see all the characters commenting on photos in real life!)

The format here is simple: a chapter per person. There’s an introduction written by Maran, a quick summary of said person’s personal life and publishing history, and then a sort of freestyle, not exactly interview yet not exactly essay section written by the memoirists themselves. There are no leading questions which gives each one the opportunity to discuss whatever they want to, although most cover the basics: how I started, why I started, what the future holds for me. Every chapter ends with a “Wisdom for Memoir Writers”.

I picked up Why We Write About Ourselves in order to understand a bit more about the genre, about how those who write it do it, and why. I recognized a few of the twenty contributors, I’d actually read only a few. I wasn’t bothered much by that since, as I said, the “who” doesn’t matter to me. If someone has a good story, it’ll be good even without a proper background check and Wikipedia review. That theory definitely proved true.

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Nine Inches: Stories by Tom Perrotta

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  • Title: Nine Inches: Stories
  • Author: Tom Perrotta
  • # of Pages: 246

Nine Inches, Tom Perrotta’s first true collection, features ten stories—some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing. Whether he’s dropping into the lives of two teachers—and their love lost and found—in “Nine Inches”, documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”, or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in “Senior Season”, Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.

Nine Inches contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.

It takes a different set of skills to write short stories, to be able to write convincing, believable characters in so few words. It’s like a very concentrated drink, it needs to be strong and exact because you’re only going to get one sip to really understand the flavor.

There is no doubt that Tom Perrotta possesses that set of skills. Story after story, his characters come alive for their fifteen minutes of fame. Perrotta manages to create that feeling that we’re just getting a glimpse, that there’s a whole life before and after that will continue on without us. It’s the way short stories should be. Sound, solid, able to carry that weight of their existence, past, present and future.

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Year In Review: 2017

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Hello, folks. Another year gone, time for new goals to fail and new resolutions to forget about. A clean slate. But first – a quick flashback.

This year I technically failed my reading goal. I actually stopped going onto Goodreads in order to avoid their constant “You are nine books behind!” shaming. I had to overcome a broken ankle, a crazy exam, but more importantly – really long books. Like, reeeeally long. In 2016 I read 24 books that totaled to about 9200 pages. In 2017 I read 16 (!!) books that totaled to about 8500 pages. That’s an average book length of 572 pages (because, as we all know, Goodreads doesn’t only like shaming, they also like providing you with very detailed statistics about everything you do). That’s a difference of eight books between the two years but only 700 pages. Allow me to be impressed. Sixteen is a new low for me, and one I hope to never sink down to again, but if you go for sixteen, at least do it with style, ya know?

So what did we have?

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Parnassus On Wheels by Christopher Morley

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  • Title: Parnassus On Wheels
  • Author: Christopher Morley
  • # of Pages: 142

Image result for Parnassus On Wheels“I warn you,” said the funny-looking little man with the red beard, “I’m here to sell this caravan of culture, and by the bones of Swinburne I think your brother’s the man to buy it.” Christopher Morley’s unforgettably weird classic tale of adventure on a traveling bookstore called Parnassus, drawn by a steed called Pegasus. Not to be missed.

Miss Helen McGill lives on a farm with her brother Andrew. Everything is going great-  until Andrew becomes an author. It starts with one book of his being published, and soon Miss McGill finds herself running the farm on her own, as her brother focuses on his new career. “He hardly ever looked at the ears Roebuck catalogs any more, and after Mr. Decameron came to visit us and suggested that Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became simply unbearable.”

One day a strange little man shows up with a wagon full of books, wanting to sell them to Andrew McGill. He’s been travelling around the country to introduce the simple folks to literature but now he wants to write a book about his travels, so he needs someone else to take over for him. Miss McGill realizes that if Andrew ever hears about this, she’ll never see him again, so on a whim she decides to buy the wagon herself and go on an unplanned vacation.
Thus begins a very entertaining adventure, with Miss McGill as the star, along with a dog, a horse and the strange little man. If you’re looking for a gripping plot – this is probably not the book for you. However, if all you need is a pleasant little tale with a few surprises and a crew of amusing characters – go right ahead. An interesting concept, a few laughs and a sweet ending – the best companion for a winter’s cup of chocolate milk.

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