Recent reading

[luzula]

My Friends the Miss Boyds, by Jane Duncan (1959)
Oh, I loved this! It's a memoir of a childhood in the Western Highlands during WWI, and I knew from the first page that I was going to enjoy it. It's one of those books where the character voice is so distinct and interesting that it doesn't really matter how much (or little) plot it has. The main character is eight-year-old Janet, who equally has friends who are children, adults, or animals, and the relationships to all of them are wonderfully described. And the setting is also very enjoyable! I see that this is the first of a 19-volume series, wow. I think I possibly got the rec from oursin?

That Loyalty of Friendship, by regshoe (2023)
This is a novel-length Kidnapped/Flight of the Heron crossover, or rather the crossover is with Gleam in the North. The author does a great job of interweaving the two sets of characters, the idea being that Alan Breck Stewart instead of Lochdornie is Archibald Cameron's partner in Jacobite plotting, thus bringing the Kidnapped characters into the plot of GitN. If you've read regshoe's fic before, you already know what you'll be getting: beautiful old-fashioned prose, attention paid to details of setting, lovely nature descriptions, and thoughtfully written characterization. It does also have more action and adventure than much of what she's written before, though!

Comments

[oursin]

Oh, the Jane Duncans are lovely! I did a post on my massive re-read of the whole sequence here and various occasional further mentions - since then, rather annoyingly, they've been made available as ebooks at a very reasonable price, after I had been chasing up used copies for years.

[luzula]

Well, thanks for bringing them to my attention! : ) Hmm, cannot find the ebooks though (looked on Kobo and Amazon)...how strange.

[oursin]

Huh: Pan Macmillan's Bello Books reprint line was doing them some years ago, not sure what happened there.

[chestnut_pod]

19-volume series! Wow is right.

[luzula]

Slightly shorter than the Aubrey-Maturin books! But not much so.

[cyphomandra]

Jane Duncan’s Friends series is so good! Amazing character moments and as the series goes on it constantly surprised and moved me.
It’s one of those series where I have not yet read the last two books, firstly because I had trouble finding the second to last one and secondly because I don’t want them to be over (I have not yet read the Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey either :D)

[luzula]

I'm glad to hear more people have read them! I'll definitely be hunting down more of them--it seems like one of those series where it will probably take me the rest of my life to read them, not being a binge reader but preferring to space out books in series.

I have not yet read the Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey either :D
I did finally read that a few years ago!

[starshipfox]

Oooh, My Friends the Miss Boyds looks right up my alley! Thank you for the rec.

[luzula]

It was a very pleasant surprise! I thought, oh, I'll just look at the first page of it while determining what to read next, and then I was stuck. I hope you enjoy it, too. : )

[jesse_the_k]

Sorry about the lack of ebooks -- in an emergency the Internet Archive has scanned many of them

[luzula]

Oh, of course, I should have known--it's a bother to read on a computer screen, but it's good to know that they exist there as a backup.