Recent reading
Dec. 4th, 2023 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaA Man of Independent Mind by L A Hall (2019)
I have a cold, so it's time for comfort reading! This is basically the 14th in the series, so don't start here. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this volume focusing on the character Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald--it starts out with some diary entries shedding light on previous events from his POV, but then it jumps forward in time quite a lot, and we get the story of two close friends supporting each other and both grieving their romantic partners. I really enjoyed that part, it was beautiful and sympathetic. Later on we finally get Sandy and Clorinda having sex in the spirit of scientific enquiry, which I had been wanting to read. *gleeful* I mean, it's not like I ship them as anything other than close friends, but there had been a certain tension/curiosity there. And then there's a final part where Sandy meets someone new and also there are complications surrounding the Bexbury inheritance. All very enjoyable, A+ comfort reading.
A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975)
A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland. I do have thoughts about gender, though? The most common selkie story I've read is the one about a female selkie whose skin is stolen by a man, and then she becomes his wife and bears his children, and years afterwards she finds her skin again and leaves. This is not that. I think you only need to read the back cover to figure out that the male stranger who comes ashore is the selkie, and that he is a threat to the family's daughter. So in both cases, regardless of whether it's the man or the woman who is the selkie, it's the man who is the threat. Which I guess makes sense, because patriarchy, but it makes for a very different view on the selkies.
Oh, and you might be interested to know that Annick Trent has a free novelette out: Harvest Season, which is historical f/f with two working-class protagonists.
I have a cold, so it's time for comfort reading! This is basically the 14th in the series, so don't start here. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this volume focusing on the character Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald--it starts out with some diary entries shedding light on previous events from his POV, but then it jumps forward in time quite a lot, and we get the story of two close friends supporting each other and both grieving their romantic partners. I really enjoyed that part, it was beautiful and sympathetic. Later on we finally get Sandy and Clorinda having sex in the spirit of scientific enquiry, which I had been wanting to read. *gleeful* I mean, it's not like I ship them as anything other than close friends, but there had been a certain tension/curiosity there. And then there's a final part where Sandy meets someone new and also there are complications surrounding the Bexbury inheritance. All very enjoyable, A+ comfort reading.
A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975)
A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland. I do have thoughts about gender, though? The most common selkie story I've read is the one about a female selkie whose skin is stolen by a man, and then she becomes his wife and bears his children, and years afterwards she finds her skin again and leaves. This is not that. I think you only need to read the back cover to figure out that the male stranger who comes ashore is the selkie, and that he is a threat to the family's daughter. So in both cases, regardless of whether it's the man or the woman who is the selkie, it's the man who is the threat. Which I guess makes sense, because patriarchy, but it makes for a very different view on the selkies.
Oh, and you might be interested to know that Annick Trent has a free novelette out: Harvest Season, which is historical f/f with two working-class protagonists.
