A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Betty Brock’s No Flying in the House, which is adorable and yet also oddly disappointing? The heroine discovers that she is part fairy, and can fly! Only in the end she has to give up her magic powers to rescue her parents, and the whole thing is doubtless teaching an important lesson about how money/talent/fame/etc can’t buy happiness, which comes forth from the loving relationships in our life…

And I am as in favor of loving relationships as the next person, but all the same I want her to have love and the continued ability to fly.

I also read Sharon M. Draper’s Stella by Starlight. I actually intended just to start reading Stella by Starlight, but somehow I just kept reading until I’d read the whole thing. It takes place in the segregated south in 1932, and the Klan is an ominous shadowy presence throughout the book, threatening Stella’s tight-knit community.

There’s a scene where the whole black community turns out to walk three of its members down to the polling station to vote - and just stand there and stare at the sheriff until he decides that, shoot, he doesn’t want to take on all of them all at once, and lets the three registered voters in. It’s tense and affecting and very well done.

Also a book that will probably make you hungry, because there are a lot of festive meals and they sound so good.

What I’m Reading Now

Still Possession! I just finished chapter 10, and I have a few scattered thoughts.

1. Is it bad that I sort of ship Maud and her American colleague Loretta? Loretta is a ridiculous person, or at least everyone in the book seems to find her so. They all seem to find it faintly distasteful and, well, American that she left an enormous bouquet on her favorite poetess’s neglected grave, and actually had the audacity to ask for clippers to clear away some of the weeds, good lord.

Actually, I think this is why I like Loretta. As a fellow American I feel the urge to jump to her defense against the snotty Brits who won’t even lend her a pair of clippers. Like that’s such an imposition.

In any case, Loretta is clearly very into Maud. And Maud/Loretta sounds much more interesting to me than Maud/Roland, which I became 99% certain is going to be endgame the moment that Maud and Roland bumped into each other awkwardly outside of the bath.


2. The description of that bathroom is first rate, though, the basin with its riot of porcelain wildflowers. Actually I’m really enjoying the whole crumbling country house thing that the story has going, to the extent that I actually felt a bit annoyed about it when the country-house parts stopped dead for us to actually read the letters exchanged between R. H. Ash and Cristabel LaMotte.


3. It probably didn’t help matters that I spent a large part of those letters internally yelling “GO BACK TO BLANCHE, CRISTABEL.” Cristabel lives with a woman named Blanche Glover in what may or may not be a sexual relationship, but either way Blanche adores her, and Cristabel’s faithlessness, reluctant though it is, distresses me.

Generally I feel kind of salty about all the heterosexuality in this book. It holds out the possibility for lesbianism and then snatches it away, and it makes me feel like a child who almost got a cookie, only for it to be thrown on the ground in the end.


4. Then again, we already know that Cristabel went back to Blanche in the end, so clearly her little excursion with Mr. Ash didn’t end their idyll. Maybe I'm being to hard on the book.



What I Plan to Reading Next

I actually have no concrete plans for once. Perhaps I ought to read that other Revolutionary War book I borrowed from the university library.