Robynettely

Any book that has a blurb on the back saying "Probably the best sheep detective novel you'll read all year!" can't take itself too seriously. I read a review of this one near the start of the summer, maybe on www.salon.com . I think it was part of a "beach reads" article. I requested it through interlibrary loan, and got it 3.5 weeks ago. It was very fun. I wanted to read it because I want to write a "Watership down of (insert name of animal here)" kind of book, and the idea of limited thought processes, skills and abilities in a mystery appealed to me. The sheep can understand human speech (English but not Gaelic), but we can't understand them. They have lots of sheepy limitations -- they don't like to be alone, they eat all the time, they know they are edible, they generally (except Mopple the Whale) have poor memories. They have many sheepy advantages -- they can tell if a person is lying because they can smell it; no one is very conce...

This book didn't offend me. I read it to the boy, and it moved along well enough and with enough humour to entertain him. Something that amazes me (and I suppose this is a criticism of him, not the books) is that the books were sitting around for maybe 18 months before we ran out of other things to read and wound up reading the first one, and then this one in quick succession (and I believe tomorrow I will get to purchase the third volume in the series). Why is he so reluctant to try something new? Though we were casting about for something to read "in the meantime" a couple of nights ago, and he declined to start Harry Potter again. He said there was no point, now that there was nothing to anticipate. Fascinating. Update on my coworkers making fun of my clothing: Yesterday the person who referred to one garment I wear as my "elf suit" wore a boxy green jacket with a large applique weasel wrapping around the neck. The head was on her left shoulder, and the tail ...

Found this in the Young Adult section of the library and picked it up without reading the back because I like fairy tale things. I hadn't realized I had read another book in this series, "Snow White and Rose Red", which featured two girls named Blanche and Rosamund (neither of those names sounds particularly beautiful to my ear, maybe because I hear them with a New England accent). I just looked it up on Amazon to get the title right, and considering that I got it out of the library at Toronto City Hall, I must have taken it out at least twelve years ago. I'm amazed I remember much of anything about it. And I discovered it was by Patricia C. Wrede, whose Enchanted Forest Chronicles I quite liked. I had a hard time getting into this book. I read the first 40 pages or so, which alternate between short chapters where Gemma (the grandmother) tells Sleeping Beauty in different snippets to her three granddaughters (abandoning the story at a later point each time for a diff...