A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Bad Heir Day: A Comedy of High Class and Dire Straits by Wendy Holden. Sourcebooks Landmark; Reprint edition (September 1, 2010); ISBN: 978-1402240614; 352 Pages. Price: List $14.99 (Amazon: $10.79 / Kindle: $9.99).

Anna Farrier’s life is going nowhere when Bad Heir Day begins. She’s living with Sebastian “Seb” Lavenham, an upper-class playboy with commitment problems. After attending a wedding of one of Seb’s school friends at Dampie Castle on the Island of Skul, Anna begins to take a hard look at her current situation and reluctantly admits it’s going beyond depressing. She hasn’t written anything in a long time and in reality she’s nothing but Seb’s live-in maid with benefits. She’s ready for a change.

Luckily, at the wedding, while Seb was making out with all his old girlfriends, she met Geri, a woman with a plan for her life, who was full of helpful hints on how to get Anna’s life on track, beginning with becoming an author’s assistant. Anna puts up an ad and gets a call from Cassandra Knight who just lost her au pair – again – and needs a replacement but the service won’t send anyone else out to care for her hellion of a son, Zachary. Anna accepts the position thinking it’s to help with research and writing and ends up being an extremely low-paid babysitter and household help.

It turns out the waiter she met at the wedding actually owns the castle and he’s in desperate need of a wife. By the time he shows up in London, Anna’s experience as Cassandra’s pseudo-slave, Zach’s victim, and Jett’s (Cassandra’s husband) potential conquest has not helped her self-esteem or her writing. She’s ready for a change.

Bad Heir Day is a lot of fun even while being totally predictable. However, I read this almost immediately after reading Farm Fatale and found the underlying structure to be quite similar. I think if I’d had more time between the two books, the plot structure wouldn’t have been as noticeable. Even so there were some great one liners and lots of eye-rolling moments as the story unfolded. The characters are more archetypes than fully developed but in the context of the odd-ball romantic comedy story, it really doesn’t matter.

Bad Heir Day is pure entertainment with a mild message of “don’t ruin your life trying to be someone you’re not”. Just grab a cup or glass of your favorite beverage, put up your feet, and enjoy watching someone else’s life going off the rails and somehow finding a perfect mate in spite of the chaos their life has become.

I noticed that today would have been Julia Child’s birthday. I remember seeing her on TV when her cooking show was new and I was young. I remember her voice and the fact that she made it look like no matter what happened, or what went wrong, it was okay, because who’d know what went on in your kitchen if the guests were all in the living room. I have to wonder what she’d think of the popularity of open floor plans where your guests gather around the kitchen island and watch you get dinner ready. Somehow I doubt that it would bother her.

Last week we finally watched Julie & Julia based on the book by Julie Powell. Powell wrote a blog where she cooked her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, in a period of 365 day making 524 recipes. You can still read the blog online — the Julie / Julia Project. The last post is about when Julie heard that Julia Child died. (Amazon has the book available in paperback with a look inside so you can get a taste of the writing.)

Julia Child was an amazing woman. She did so much at a time when women were so circumscribed in what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives. If you haven’t seen the movie here’s the trailer — maybe you’ll decided it’s a must see too.

I thought the movie was informative and affirming. I like cooking and I’m no great chef — I’m more a plain home cooking type with once in a great while a foray into making something fancy. I admire Julie Powell for working her way through all those recipes — that’s a lot of work, especially when holding down a full-time job. Seems there are lots of daring women in the world we just need to keep our eyes and ears open.

One Fine Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy
Sourcebooks Casablanca, ISBN: 978-1-4022-3670-9, pages 416
(List: $6.99 / Amazon: $6.99 / Kindle: $4.79).

Charlie Banks is a graduate student in psychology who is looking to do research on non-verbal communication, especially between species.  Her advisor has sent her to a clinic at Latigo Ranch with Nate Shawcross who is a horse whisperer.   It seemed like a great idea to Charlie except that the ranch is out in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, with no sizable town, let alone a city, for miles in any direction, and she’s a city girl through and through.   Of course her car breaks down just short of the ranch. Luckily, a cowboy stops by to offer assistance.

Nate Shawcross, her cowboy rescuer and the owner of Latigo Ranch, doesn’t know a thing about the clinic, or the people who signed up.  Seems his girlfriend wrote the brochures, sent then out, collected the deposits, and then wiped out his bank accounts, took the deposits, and left for Denver.  Charlie, of course, is attracted to Nate in spite of herself, and steps in to help him out.   Luckily the other three guests are understanding and more interested in learning to work with the horses than in having a fancy dude ranch experience.

Being a novel,   the readers, know that that’s not the end of Nate’s problems or Charlie’s or the last we’ll see or hear of Nate’s ex-girlfriend, Sandy.  In fact, as a romance this story is predictable; however, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the story is absorbing.  Kennedy manages to stay to the usual tropes of romance writing but give as an intriguing story of people and relationships on many levels.

“No one is an island” said John Donne, and that is still true today and in this story.  Each character acts upon the others and together that forms a community that supports and helps them to cope with their problems and issues rather than retreating into isolation.  Charlie being a graduate student in psychology is not simply a device to get the character out to a ranch in Wyoming, but a choice that allows the author to explore relationships a bit deeper within the story.  It also brings up the question of what is the best use of a person’s talents.  Aren’t the people who work quietly in the background making contributions to society as much, or even more than those on the public stage?  (Discuss among yourselves after you finish the book or bring your thoughts here and share.)

Whether you’re looking for a typical romance or a story that has people dealing with real problems then give Joanne Kennedy’s One Fine Cowboy a try.

Finally, a weekend day with no appointments or meetings scheduled. Managed to do the shopping for food and mail out books and made it to the bank before checks were too old to cash. Didn’t get to recycling though so guess that has to collect until next week — we don’t have a trash pick up where we live and we pay a private company to pick up the trash. Then since we recycle, we have to take all the recyclables to the center ourselves. Question why does doing the right thing always mean more work?

Heard a noise on the porch a while ago and Paul went to check it out because last night two raccoons were out there eating the cats food.  Tonight, we thought they were back but it was a feral cat who dropped by for a late snack with our Emnot.  However, Emnot decided to hide behind the blueberry bushes we have on the deck until it finished eating.  The feral just moved away to the edge of the car port and sat to wait.  Paul put some food out downstairs — maybe the feral will come back.  We could always use another good mouser/moler out here in the woods.  Since Emnot came to live with us the side yard is much less spongy to walk on with a less holes than it did have.

Actually got some vegetables this year.  Then garden is winding down and I’m going to miss the fresh tomatoes.  The thing is there are blossoms on the tomato plants and the green pepper plants but the night are dropping down to the 60’s and 50’s at night now.  Though today was in the high 70’s.  You can almost taste fall in the air.  Bought a small orangey-red mum to brighten up the living room.

Got to finish up some reviews for here.  Hope to post a review of One Fine Cowboy (Joanne Kennedy) and Bad Heir Day (Wendy Holden) this coming week so watch for that.

Dropped some bookmarks for Capclave at the Border’s in Bowie and Waldorf.  Hoping it spreads the word our our local science fiction convention in Rockville, Maryland in October.  The Guests of Honor are Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer.  I’m this year’s chair of the convention — luckily, I have a great committee but as the date gets closer I get more anxious that everything turn out well for the participants and attendees.

Have you ever been to a science fiction convention?

Georgette Heyer’s Regency World by Jennifer Kloester. Published by Sourcebooks. ISBN: 978-1-4022-4136-9, 387 pages including index. Trade Paperback. $14.99 (Amazon: $10.19; Kindle: $9.68)

Georgette Heyer’s Regency World by Jennifer Kloester is just what the title implies, it’s a book about the Regency World that made up the background for Heyer’s Regency books. It helps to explain to today’s readers the nitty gritty details of what it was like to live in that time, in that society, and explains a lot of the customs, rules, and etiquette of that period. Now I know that makes it sounds like it would be incredibly dull and boring but, in fact, Kloester’s book is extremely readable. I started with the intent to read it front to back and before I was in more than 30 pages, I found myself reading a bit that made me think of a question, so I checked the table of contents and index and thereafter I skipped and dipped into the book at will, checking on those things that had niggled at the back of my brain when reading one book or another.

I wanted to read this book because I read a fair number of books that take place during the Regency Period. I will admit that I don’t read a lot of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels. So, while the book is filled with examples from Heyer’s writings, I wasn’t familiar with the works cited; however, that’s not a problem because Kloester gives enough background that if you’ve read in the period you’ll get pick up what’s being explained from the books you have read.

Georgette Heyer’s Regency World is well organized so that the reader can go to a specific section to find an answer to questions about what the society was like and how it worked. Chapters are titled: Up and Down the Social Ladder; At Home in Town and Country; A Man’s World; The Gentle Sex; On the Town; The Pleasure Haunts of London; The Fashionable Resorts; Getting About; What to Wear; Shopping; Eat, Drink and Be Merry; The Sporting Life; Business and the Military; and Who’s Who in the Regency. Each chapter in the table of contents is listed with a subset of what’s included in that chapter, for example; the chapter on Getting About includes: All Kinds of Carriages; On Drivers and Driving; Public Transport; On the Road; Long-Distance Travel; and Turnpikes, Toll-gates and Tickets. Each individual chapter starts with an overview of what will be covered in that chapter. I was surprised to learn that long distance travel was considered anything further away than 10 miles. That’s rather difficult to wrap your mind around when most of us travel further than that one-way to work now-a-days.

There are also black and white illustrations throughout the book. I found the pictures of the various types of carriages, the cut-a-way view of a London townhouse, types of dress, and a circulating library, among others to be worth more than words while changing the mind pictures I’d built up while reading. There are also several appendices: A Glossary of Cant and Common Regency Phrases; Newspapers and Magazines; Books in Heyer; Timeline; Reading about the Regency and Where Next?; and Georgette Heyer’s Regency Novels.

For readers of books set in the Regency period, Georgette Heyer’s Regency World is an outstanding resource for understanding the world and society those characters lived in. For those who read books that take place in historical settings, the world has changed. Many of the social conventions that ruled the lives of the people living in Regency England no longer apply. Even during that period people who were born into the lower social classes found it difficult to deal with the myriad levels of behavior that those in the upper class were breed and trained to exhibit in their behavior. Many of the books set in that period mention the misunderstandings and missteps that characters took when moving into a higher social circle than that which they grew up in.

If you enjoy the Regency period, and want to have a better understanding of what society was like, this is probably the best, most accessible and readable book you’ll find on the subject. Even though I haven’t yet read Heyer’s Regency novels (I now have several on my to be read pile), I found Georgette Heyer’s Regency World a wonderful guide to the ins and outs of this social, cultural, historical time period of so many of the books that I read as a Jane Austen fan.

I’d like to hear other readers’ impressions of this work. Have you read it? Do you plan to?

The zines went live last night at midnight but I added at least four from people today and expect another one or two tomorrow. So the official announcements have not yet gone out to our mailing list.  If you want to be on the mailing list just go to either SFRevu.com or GumshoeReview.com and join the mailing list. We only send one email a month — we might do a special announcement email once in a blue moon and those, as you know, are pretty rare.

I expect that I’ll soon be back to actually  making posts with content soon. In fact, I’m working on a book review for tomorrow. It’s a fun, light romance with a British slant but oh, so relevant to most of us city folks dreaming of the quiet country side.

Finally, I’ve wrestled my Jali Sweater chart into submission and have almost completed a full pattern repeat. Yeah, me! I only ripped the entire thing out and started from scratch about 6 or 7 times before the light bulb over my head went on. Boy that’s embarrassing to know that somehow you forgot how to read between casting on and following the chart. But more about that project in another post.

Raining off and on all day.  Rain always seems to create the perfect day for reading, especially mysteries — maybe it’s the grey sky, overcast cloudiness, and feeling of oppression — or is that just the headache .

Anyway, I spent a good part of the day reading Holly Blues by Susan Wittig Albert. It’s a China Bayles mystery and the review will be in the May issue of Gumshoe Review — got the book too late to make the April issue. So far, it’s exactly what I expected — lots of interesting characters, lots of surprises, and new interactions between people, and the mystery keeps you reading. Check out the full review next month.

Meanwhile, tea, aspirin, and a good book makes a dreary day go by much better.

The Darcy Cousins: Scandal, Mischief, and Mayhem arrive at Pemberley… by Monica Fairview, Sourcebooks, ISBN: 978-1-4022-3700-3, pages 432.

The rift between Darcy and his aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh has been somewhat mended since Elizabeth has given birth to an heir. Of course that doesn’t mean that Lady Catherine actually recognizes Elizabeth’s presence. But the entire family is gathering at Rosings once more for Easter. Joining the family are Robert Darcy (see The Other Mr. Darcy) and his wife and two relatives from America, Frederick Darcy and his sister Clarissa Darcy.

Georgiana is hoping that she and Clarissa will become close friends. Georgiana has been feeling that she’s in the way or not really wanted. Darcy marrying Elizabeth was definitely a good thing but where Georgiana always had her brother for company now he seems always involved with Elizabeth and their son — they don’t purposely exclude her they just don’t seem to notice.

Once Frederick and Clarissa arrive, they seem to get off on the wrong foot with Lady Catherine. While Frederick can be accepted, after all he is American, a business man, and rich. Clarissa must learn to become a lady — of course that’s the type of lady that Lady Catherine approves of, and that’s where all the trouble begins. Clarissa is neither tractable or docile.

Georgiana and Clarissa do become friends. Georgiana learns that one can be a lady and still have strong opinions and interests of her own. When Clarissa is appalled by the way everyone ignores Anne de Bourgh and has Georgiana join her in her campaign to become friends with Anne, Georgiana begins to realize that she’s always just accepted things and never looked at them from the outside. She’s also surprised by what they learn. Her eyes opened, she begins to look at other behaviors she’s always accepted.

As is usual, one things leads to another and before long Lady Catherine is convinced that Clarissa is practically the devil personified, and there to ruin the family. Once again the family finds itself rent by Lady Catherine’s insistence on her point of view. Everyone decamps for London and the season.

Georgiana struggles to find her own way in society with her new insights. She learns that Clarissa is in England for more than this visit and that there are depths to her American cousin. In fact, soon Clarissa and Georgiana find themselves interested in the same man. But is he the right man for either of them? Will their friendship last through the season?

To say any more would spoil the fun of learning all the secrets, intrigues, and adventures to be had in The Darcy Cousins. The book’s advanced press implies that the book is all about Clarissa and her problems but this is really Georgiana’s story. Clarissa is the spur that goads Georgiana to action and change. Georgiana is firmly front and center. She’s always been in the background and this time Monica Fairview gives the reader a chance to get to know her a bit better. Shy? Yes, but also she has the same strong Darcy stubbornness and loyalty. It’s a turbulent story as Georgiana becomes a person most of us would like to know better and have stand at our side in adversity.

Another excellent follow on to Pride and Prejudice that maintains the integrity of the original characters while moving the story of their lives forward.