Recent reading

The Shield Ring by Rosemary Sutcliff (1956). Starting off the new year with a Sutcliff again! This one is set among the Norse-Saxon people of the eleventh-century Lake District resisting Norman invasion, but it feels much more like a late outlier of the Roman and otherwise 'ancient' books than like her later-set ones. The main character is Frytha, a young Saxon girl who takes refuge in a northern Norse stronghold after her home in Lancashire is destroyed by the Normans; the Norse resistance are led by Jarl Buthar, who is Sutcliff's explanation for the modern name Buttermere. Sutcliff seems to struggle with writing a female protagonist here, in a way she certainly didn't with The Rider of the White Horse; she often leaves Frytha's perspective to follow the boys and men at war, and it really felt like Frytha's friend and implied love interest Bjorn got more narrative attention and character development than she did (even the dolphin ring is his heirloom!). But I liked Frytha and her story—she gets involved in the war, taking on somewhat masculine roles but in a way that felt plausible—and Frytha/Bjorn was pretty good as canon het goes (it's really written more like a slashy relationship between two male characters than like a typical het romance—right down to the never being explicitly confirmed as romantic!—which probably explains that). Also the significant landscape and nature descriptions are utterly beautiful as ever; there are a lot of curlews, which I especially liked. :)

An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson (1878). RLS's first published book, an account of a canoe trip which he and his friend Walter Grindlay Simpson took along the rivers and canals of northern France. A while ago luzula and I were agreeing and lamenting that we couldn't find the charm of Kidnapped in Stevenson's other books—well, here it is, read this one! This is a very charming book, funny and warm and enjoyable (barring the occasional opinion on gender; incidentally, Stevenson met Fanny for the first time on this trip, but there's not a hint of that in the book). Stevenson recounts various humorous incidents in the 'voyage', and is ready to laugh at himself as well as portraying his surroundings and the people he meets with eloquent and imaginative humour. I liked his device of referring to himself and Grindlay Simpson by the names of their boats!

A Fourth Form Friendship by Angela Brazil (1912). A classic girls' school story recommended to me by edwardianspinsteraunt. I had been a little intimidated by Angela Brazil (pronounced to rhyme with 'dazzle', so Wikipedia informs me) because she wrote so many books, but it turns out they're mostly standalones and so you can easily dip in and out wherever. The set-up of this one is fairly simple: fourteen-year-old Aldred Laurence, who has heaps of potential in her academic ability and her character but a certain weakness for untruths, goes to school; she meets the aristocratic Mabel Farrington, who suddenly becomes very eager to befriend her... It turns out Mabel has heard a story about a girl who heroically rescued a toddler from a house fire and, for reasons of contrived coincidence, is under the mistaken impression that the heroine was Aldred. Will Aldred admit the truth, or will she continue to allow her school career and her genuine and significant friendship with Mabel to be imperilled by their treacherous foundation of lies??? The tension of this plot, and the comic school-story adventures that the girls get into on the way through it, are really good fun, and the sentimental friendship between Aldred and Mabel is adorable. All ends in suitably dramatic but ultimately happy fashion, of course. Really good stuff!

Temeraire by Naomi Novik (2006; published in the US as His Majesty's Dragon). I had osmosed the vague impression of these books as 'Hornblower-esque Age of Sail boat books, but with dragons', and so was slightly surprised to find that this first entry in the series starts with the main character, Captain William Laurence, being obliged to leave the Navy to go and be a dragon captain instead. It's very good fun fantasy; I really liked the dragon worldbuilding and enjoyed the twists and turns of the plot, and the prose, barring the occasional anachronism (everyone is saying hello to each other far too often) and Americanism, is engaging without being too jarringly modern (Novik likes her semicolons, of which I approve). And I very much liked Temeraire himself—the 'most special dragon ever' thing went a bit far, but he is endearingly ingenuous and noble, and he and Laurence are very cute reading together. Right, random nitpicks, in order of importance:

• I did not like the treatment of women, either on a worldbuilding or a character-writing level. I could absolutely buy that women would be dragon captains, if the dragons made it necessary; I could not buy that they'd be treated exactly the same as the male captains just as if it was an ideal modern workplace (in fact that was one of a few ways in which the 'separate world' portrayal of the Corps felt a little like an excuse to write characters with more modern sensibilities than would otherwise appear in a Napoleonic-era novel, which, why are you writing historical fiction, then?)—and going that far while still keeping women a definite minority seemed an odd choice. There are a couple of attempts at interesting female characters, but one's main story is an utterly baffling and barely-detailed romance with Laurence, the other also has an unappealing romantic storyline, and they have no relationship at all with each other (which is a shame, because based purely on character I think there'd be some potential in shipping them).
• Part of the book is ostensibly set in the Scottish Highlands (Laurence learns dragon-captaining at a training ground at Loch Laggan), but you really wouldn't know it from any of the description or cultural detail. In fact the whole book was lacking in local specificity or detail of setting, which was a big weakness.
• So are the different types of dragon naturally-occurring species or domesticated breeds? Why is the book so persistently and almost explicitly unclear about this???
• Why are the dragon coverts all wooded? I was confused by how Novik kept going on about 'clearings', but it seems like there are supposed to be trees everywhere else? You'd think they'd need more pasture land instead for all those sheep and cows the dragons get through.
• People in this book drink coffee so quickly! There are multiple occasions where hot coffee is served and a few lines later a character is finishing their nth cup. I hope they're not scalding their tongues too badly.
• I note with interest that the canonical AO3 tag for this series is Temeraire - Naomi Novik.

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (1953). I'd been aware of this for a while as a potentially interesting classic, but picked it up after phantomtomato recently reviewed another of Hartley's books and mentioned that it was very queer. It is that!—and it has a lot of interesting and complicated things to say about sexuality, class and the ways they clash, but what really struck me about it was the way Hartley perfectly portrays the odd specificity and idiosyncrasy of childhood mentality and imagination via the experiences of the twelve-year-old title character and narrator, Leo. There's also some precisely-observed portrayal of the ways adults treat children and the ways they fail them, and of the very specific culture of late-Victorian/Edwardian schoolboys (you can tell that Hartley was one!). Between the schoolboys, the Boer War background and the significant detailed cricket match, this may be of some interest to Raffles fandom. (Incidentally, can I not count?—either that baby was born very premature or it must have been conceived months before the significant ending scene, surely?)