May 9: A Good Kiss is Hard to Find by Augustine Lang. Reread, but I’d forgotten most of the real meat of the story. I like these people! And it’s a kind of romance I can actually read without cringing, with very little failure-to-communicate.
May 6: A Fairwell Friendship by Augustine Lang. Romance is not usually my genre (I love the people! But I wish they were in a different story!) but these are delightful, and I’m rereading the others now we’ve got them all.
Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts. (My copy is called “Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy” but it’s the same thing.) I think I’ll read all Inspector Frenches eventually; this one didn’t disappoint (wonderful twist at the end, and I love a full exposition of how everything was perpetrated) though I wish Inspector French wasn’t so obsessed with his possible promotion.
May 5: Chaos on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer. Easily as good as Catfishing on Catnet. Which was already apparent from the reading at CoNZealand. May deserve a blog post of its own. (Strangely, Catfishing on Catnet had very much Catnet in it but very little catfishing; Chaos on Catnet has plenty of chaos but very little Catnet. Doesn’t make it any less exciting or enjoyable.)
May 2: Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Wow, this is amazing. I’ll never read a school story with quite the same eyes again. (Also it has as hard-to-search-for title as my own Terms of Service, though the subtitle and the author’s name make that a lot better.) In later chapters it becomes a bit repetitive, as books of this kind tend to be, but still compelling. At the end I briefly thought “why am I not one of these women?” but I’d probably have been thoroughly unhappy in boarding school, bullied and outcast. It’s not easy being green neurodivergent, even in the weird progressive high school I was in.
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