A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I zoomed through Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Baby, The Year of the Fortune Cookie, and The Year of the Three Sisters, and I could have read the final book in the series (actually a prequel) The Year of the Garden except I wasn’t ready for it to be over yet. The books are about a Chinese-American girl growing up in Cincinnati and the ebb and flow of her friendships over the years: for instance, one of her friends starts going to a different school and their friendship suffers for the separation, even though they do remain friends. It’s such a realistic progression, but also one that books often don’t reflect.

I also finished Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women, which frustrated me in exactly the same way as many of See’s other books, and yet this frustration has never dimmed my desire to read her new books as soon as they come out. There just aren’t that many adult historical fiction books centered on women’s friendships.

And I finished Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is a delight, because Sayers knows the advertising milieu so well because she worked in advertising herself - in fact she namechecks her own most successful campaign: Lord Peter’s Whifflets promotion will be “the biggest advertising stunt since the Mustard Club.” There’s also a self-insert in Miss Meteyard, the firm’s only female copywriter, who told an aspiring blackmailer to “publish and be damned” - which is just what Sayers told a man at her firm when he tried to blackmail her.



It occurs to me that in having the fictional blackmailer murdered, Sayers may have been enacting a little vicarious revenge on the man who tried to blackmail her. I wonder if he ever read her books and got a bit nervous at just how inventive she was with the murder weapons.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started reading Annie Barrows’ Nothing, and I realize that the conceit of the book is that it’s a YA novel where nothing happens - no mystical powers, dystopias, dramatic love affairs, etc - but there are interesting ways to write stories about nothing much happening and three chapters in I’m not convinced that Barrows knows how to do this.

What I Plan to Read Next

The final book in the Anna Wang quintet, The Year of the Garden.

Also Elizabeth Wein’s A Thousand Sisters is on hold for me and the library says it should be here any day now and I soooo wanted it to come before I went on vacation, but it didn’t. :( But when I get back, it should be there!