Week 16: Demon Ex Machina and the Tartan Pimpernel

By -
Demon Ex Machina, by Julie Kenner


I found this series on the WTM discussion board; someone said she wrote books, and I wondered what they were, and it was this fun series, which answers the question of: what happens to Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she grows up, retires from hunting evil, and becomes a soccer mom? OK, Kate Connor is a retired Demon Hunter, but it's the principle of the thing. Kate is dragged out of her suburban retirement when demons show up in town, and this is the 5th book of her adventures, as she juggles carpooling, playdates, and ultimate evil. Fellow moms will relate.


I don't want to discuss the storyline, since it would reveal way too much about how the series goes, so suffice to say that it's both funny and hard to put down. Read the series, and start with Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom.








The Tartan Pimpernel, by Dr. Donald Caskie


You gotta love the title! This was a really nice memoir by Dr. Caskie, a minister of the Scottish Kirk who was running the Paris branch of his church when World War II started. He had to escape Paris and ended up in Marseilles, smuggling British soldiers and agents out of the country. When that operation was shut down by a traitor, he went to Grenoble and continued his underground work for a couple of years until he was arrested and spent several months in horrible prisons. He was sentenced to death but reprieved, and spent the rest of the war in an ordinary POW prison near Paris.


His story is exciting, humorous, and full of faith. I enjoyed this one a lot and raced through it. If you like WWII memoirs, this is one to read.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more