Spoiler Alert

 

I have finally finished reviewing my 2025 books, so the next issue of the Saturday Morning Post will be the first to discuss the books I've sampled or read in 2026. 

Over the holidays Amazon offered three months of access to Kindle Unlimited for the low, low price of $.99. I decided to take them up on their offer, though, based on my previous experience last year, with no great expectations. Since all of the first dozen books I will be presenting come out of KU, spoiler alert; my expectations have been met. I only finished half of the 12 books I have started. 

This year I have a better technique to search for the "free" KU books than I used last year, which was just to go through the list of the suggested books on my Kindle app. The new method is to search by genre on Amazon with the "Kindle Unlimited" box checked, which gives me only KU enrolled books. I search them mostly, I will admit, by their covers and titles. Mostly what I'm looking for is something that may be original, since many of the covers yell "Me too!", i.e. telling the potential buyers that they are clones of the popular novels in their genre, at least in self-published books. I'm looking for the books that aren't written to the current hot market.

In a very real way, I am simply sampling books; searching for the hidden gems. And as such, "reviewing" each book that I sample might be seen as a bit unfair, since I do not give the book a full chance to reveal its full worth. However, I feel that I do give each book enough of a chance to draw me in, and if it doesn't, I can explain why. As such, the "review" is as much or more about me and my tastes as it is of the book itself, which I usually acknowledge that in the review. Most of the books I read come with high star ratings and many are quite popular, so, clearly I am not the typical of most of these books. Still reviewing them gives me a chance to talk about writing.

The books I have sampled to date are a mixture of traditionally published books, some older pre-2000 books, some post 2000 books, and some self-published. I started off with mysteries, which regular readers of this blog will know, is not my favorite type of story. That choice alone may've contributed to the DNF total. Then I switched to sea stories, but, alas, they fared no better. 

As a regular blogger, I guess I can be considered a "content creator" as YouTubers like to call themselves. As such, there is a certain pressure to create content, and in the case of my reviews, read books, whether I want to or not. I find myself somewhat in that position; I'm currently not very motivated to read books. I may be experiencing what those YouTubers call, a "reading slump" or a "reading burn out" and perhaps part of the reason for so many DNF's is that I'm not in a reading mood these days. So I don't, even when I am in the midst of a book. However, it may also be a case of not having a compelling book to read, so that after a day or two of not picking up the book I've started, I simply decide that the book is not worth continuing. It gets the "Did Not Finish" designation and a post discussing why it failed to engage me. It is hard to know where to lay the blame for that; on me in a reading slump, or on the book being not a book for me.

The fact that I am a picky reader certainly had contributed to my DNF rate. I know what I want, and have no problem putting down a book if it does not deliver what I look for in a story. I feel no obligation to finish any book I start. At the start of 2026 I am sampling books of unknown qualities in a search for my next favorite authors, and so I am a lot less picky about the books I'm auditioning. As such, process itself is prone to produce many more disappointments than if I was reading the books of known authors.

Hopefully, I will find some gems before my subscription runs out. So far, only two books earned a B- grade, the rest that I completed were only C or C+ reads. .

As for those DNF'ed books; some simply did not appeal to me for various reasons that I discuss in their reviews. Others, however, had flaws that, as a writer, I could not overlook. Reading stories as a writer, I am sometimes peeking behind the curtain, so to speak, and questioning the author's choices. And there are certain choices that annoy me, such as having characters do a dumb things just to drive the plot along. Nor do I like meandering narratives, or using very unlikely events or premises to make the story work, with a lot of handwaving. And plot holes. I hate plot holes. And being a critic, I like to point those things out. Flawed books are gist for my mill. Which, if I am honest, is why I bother to review DNF'ed books.

So, while I would love to be positive in all the books I present to you, I fear we're in a weedy patch at the moment. Hopefully, I'll find some gems...But if not, I have a wall of books that I can turn to, when I feel like reading a known good book. But until my subscription runs out, I will be looking for those KU gems... 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 172)

 

Yes, I know. I am going to have to spend more time searching for books I might like. The question is how and where? I signed up for 3 months of Kindle unlimited for just $.99, so I have a million books to discover. However, the last time I tried KU, I found it hard to find books I wanted to read... We'll see how I far this time. But this week, we're still reading an author who is well known to me, and you, if you've followed these installments for the last year.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Charity Girl by Georgette Heyer  B

This is a pleasant, light novel. Not one of her comedies, nor one of her more serious novels. It falls somewhere in the middle.

Ashely Desford is the eldest son of the Viscount Desford, a young single man about town with easy manners, a sense of humor and honor attends a local ball, and gets into a conversation with the niece of the owner of house who had not been allowed to attend the ball, as pictured on the cover above. This niece, Charity, is otherwise known as Cherry. Her mother is dead, and she has more or less abandoned by her father, being been left in the care of a boarding school, and when he failed to pay the bills, and was thought to dead, she was taken in by an aunt, who, along with her cousins, is used much like a servant. She is very unhappy, and the next day runs off to London to search for her Grandfather who a very unpleasant man, who had disinherited her father for marrying her mother. 

Desford comes across her trudging along the road, and feeling sorry for her, takes her in his carriage to London and her grandfather's house only to find it closed up. He feels responsible for her, but wat to do? This being Regency England, an unmarried girl's reputation can be ruined by being seen alone with a young man, and he certainly can't take her in until he finds her grandfather, so he takes her to the house of his childhood best friend, Hetta Silverdale, and asks her to take her in while he tracks down her grandfather. She does, and Cheery, always grateful to kindness and willing to please becomes a favorite companion of Hetta's mother, though Hetta knows that her mother will grow tired of her in time, as she always does, so that Cherry can't stay forever. In the meanwhile Desford travels the countryside, eventually tracking down her grandfather, though it takes the better part of two weeks to do so... 

This is just be barest outline of the story. There are lots of little issues, and, as always interesting characters that make this story interesting, though nothing too surprising happens. You will almost certainly guess how it ends, but will still enjoy the road to the ending.

The Foundling by Georgette Heyer  B

Our protagonist is a 24 year old orphaned  duke. He was a small and sickly child, and everyone around him did their best to keep him alive. His uncle looked after his estate and raised him, and though faithfully looking after the son of his brother, pretty much expects his charge to do what he says. And he does, including proposing to the young lady that they had been prepared to marry by her parents. What his uncle and his retainers fail to recognize is that he has grown to be a healthy young and pleasant young man. Because of this, all his old retainers still smother him with attention, not letting him do anything on his own. This is driving him crazy.

He goes to London and while visiting his cousins, learns that one of his cousins is being blackmailed for breach of promise. Since the blackmailer, the "uncle" of the young woman he wrote the letters to, has never met his cousin, our young duke decides to slip away from his smothering retains, to live the life of a common person for a while, and impersonate his cousin to somehow get the incriminating letters back. Well, as you can imagine, this adventure leads to many more adventures, including being kidnapped and imprisoned. But our duke manages to mostly overcome all these adventures and misadventures all on his own, growing up and growing in confidence in the process.

We have the usual cast of interesting characters. The title character, the foundling is a young woman who is so beautiful that just about every young man instantly falls in love with her. The problem is that she is both very pleasant, and very simple. She can be talked into about anything with the promise of a purple dress. Indeed when the blackmailer has her meet the duke when he shows up a the remoter tavern they are living in, she says exactly what her "uncle" had told her to say, even though she recognizes that the duke isn't the young man who proposed to her. She then flees to the duke, forcing him to look after her while searches for someone honorable to take her in. The duke also meets a very free spirited young man, who, while running away from home, was robbed. He takes him under his wing as well, though he also cause him many problems. And then we have the blackmailing "uncle," a smooth talking con man and criminal who always seems to land on his feet no matter that his schemes always go wrong.

This is another of her lighthearted stories, comic, but not as clever and witty as some of her other ones. A good one, but not, in my mind, quite top-tier.

My One and Two Star Reviews

I don't get a lot of written reviews or ratings these days. Not like the old days. I think most of what I call "book people" have gone back to reading paper books. Book people are those readers who buy hardcover copies, have stacks of unread books on their shelves and on their TBR piles, and keep spreadsheets of all the books they've read and want to read. They like talking about books, writing reviews, and hanging out on Goodreads. They mostly read traditionally published books, and as I said, have largely abandoned ebooks, especially self-published ebooks. My core readers are what I call simply "readers".  They read a book, and move on to the next without bothering with all the social aspects of reading. And in my case, are used to reading for free, via the library or free ebooks on the various stores. They're my people. I'm one of them. I don't usually leave ratings on Goodreads either. So I understand. That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking with it.

Reviews are a mirror that reflect booth the reader and the book. And I think negative reviews do reveal an aspect of my story telling style. So I thought it would be interesting to share my one and two star reviews with you, as a mirror to my style that I recognize. Almost all my books have at least one one star ratings, but I'm only concerned with the readers who took the time to say why they didn't like the book. 

As I mentioned, I think these reviews generally highlight one aspect of my writing, my focus on "small" stories, i.e. stories without vast implications, and stories that are not designed to wring powerful emotions out of the reader, focusing instead on providing entertaining adventure and mystery stories with pleasant characters. Many readers, I think, want more from a story. Still, it is an approach that I'm happy to own, if only because one can't please every reader, and shouldn't try to. Luckily, one and two star reviews and ratings are few and far between.

I value all my ratings and reviews, the good and the bad. I have opinions, and I express them on this blog. Everyone is entitled to also have opinions, and to express them as well. While I hope readers enjoy my books, as I said, I realize that I'm not going to please every reader, which can't be helped. I'm sorry when a reader doesn't enjoy the story, I try to be honest in my blurbs and not oversell the story. But in any event, I always appreciate it when readers tell me, and other readers, what they think about the story.

I've not listed the name of the reviewer, and I'm not going to reply to their critiques. I'm happy just to let them speak for themselves.

The reviews:

A Summer in Amber

* Awful. This was the dullest book I have ever read. Even though it was set in the future the dialogue was so old fashioned it was unbelievable. The story line didn't go anywhere and the love story was also not of a future century and dull.

* * A pastoral regency romance. Takes place in an alternate 1900 where there's cell phones but no cars. A Ph.D. is assigned to a quaint country house to transcribe a mad scientist's papers. But more important, the tempestuous daughter of the town's leader is catching his eye. She's a good character, as is the main character's cantankerous boss. But other than that, a lot of them don't have distinguishable personalities.

The prose is influenced by Jasper Fforde's slipstream, but the science fiction elements have no bearing on what happens. Nothing moves the goalposts back. The main character always has his antagonist in the palm of his hand, so there's no tension. I liked the fantastical elements, I wished there could have been more of them. The romance is the best part, and thankfully that's the main part of the plot.

The biggest flaw is that all it does it explain what's happening. There's no chance for the reader to make his/her own interpretations on motivations or character flaws. It has that early 20th century habit of spelling out everything that's happening for the reader. Not in an amateur way -- the story sounds professional -- but it means there's no element of surprise when someone's backstory comes to the foreground or a twist results. And as a result, it's hard to get invested for what's going on.

Some Day Days

* * A lengthy report about young students in the UK. Lots of repetition. A shame. The topic is very interesting. (Translated from German)

* * * (Bonus) Boring

Passage to Jarpara

* * Mostly a repeat of l the first two books. I like the author’s writing style but most of this book was many repetitive retelling of the two previous books. Every new acquaintance was told the back story. If the reader did not learn in the early chapters about Vente sorceresses, the adventures in the previous books, and that “no one can say ‘no’ to Sella”, they will certainly know it after umpteenth retelling. Indeed, the first three-quarters of the book could have been condensed into one or two chapters. The author needs a ruthless editor. Repetition seems to be a C. Litka habit: in another series the protagonist cannot stop repeating that he is “a very cautions fellow”. Yes, we know already! Tell us something new! For this book you can skip all the way to the secret island toward the end of the book and lose nothing of import.

Keiree

* * Even though this book was a cute sentiment regarding wives that had passed away It was hard for me to not fall asleep... The beginning was good, the middle was boring and I loved the ending. 

Same reviewer on Google: cute ending but pretty boring

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

* Bad

The Aerie of a Pirate Prince

* Awful. I have no understanding how this book received such high ratings from others. When one characters entire vocabulary consists of the word "Caw," and the action is about as exciting as they chase a stolen cargo shipment, this was an absolute waste of time. NOT recommended 👎

Chateau Clare

* * Story is not a great read as it is slow moving and cumbersome in details that are not really necessary to the plot. Odd references to unknown times and places with occasional hints of sorcery in prior era. This would be better as a short story, with concise details, character references, conversations and information direct to the plot.

Glencrow Summer

* (same reviewer of Chateau Clare) I don't know what to say about this book. After the whole thing was done I felt nothing and I'm not sure what it was really about. It was bland and held no excitement or adventure or interest or emotions for me. The only thing it did for me was put me to sleep, which sadly happened many times. I had to keep backing up to be sure I didn't miss anything and I found I hadn't because there was nothing to really miss. I can say I've ever read anything like it. I've never read anything that when finished, left me feeling so, well, nothing.

My eBooks Are Now Available on Bookshop.org

 

Now you can support your favorite bookshop with the purchase of my ebooks on Bookshop.org. You can find them HERE.

The price for all books is $.99 each, $.30 of which goes to your favorite bookshop, if it is affiliated with Bookshop.org, and another $.10 goes into the general fund for all bookshops.

Offering ebooks is a new feature at Bookshop.org, and my books are being offered there via Draft2Ditital. While I offer all my books that are distributed by Draft2Ditial for free on all the digital stores that support free books, $.99 is the default price of my books for those stores that don't offer free books, hence the $.99 price for my books on Bookshop.org. 

$.99 is almost free. A candy bar costs $3! (I just discovered that a few weeks ago), and I believe a fancy cup of coffee can cost twice that much. So while free is an unbeatable price, $.99 is, as MAD Magazine used to say; CHEAP! So, if you want to help keep bookstores around a little longer, you can do so by buying books via Bookshop.org, and with the $.59. I'll rake in, I'll be able to afford a candy bar with every five books purchased. It's a deal!

The Saturday Morning Post ( No. 171)

  

I would imagine that you are getting tired of hearing about Georgette Heyer's books. I've been reading a lot of them recently. There is a simple reason for this; she is an author who I really enjoy, and her books are readily available as ebooks from the library. 

Now, if one could just type into the library catalog "give me a book I will enjoy," and get a book that I would enjoy, I'd do that. But you can't. And while exploring books can be fun, back when I was getting all these Heyer books, I wanted reliable books to read. I had a lot of time to fill.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

False Colours by Georgette Heyer  A

Evelyn and Kit are identical twins, and their mother, Amabel, is a beautiful, loving, but air-headed widow. She thinks the world of her twins, and they of her. More over, the twins are so close that they know when each other is in trouble, and both would do anything to help their brother. So when Kit returns to London from his diplomatic post in Vienna, to settle a modest inheritance, with an uneasy feeling about his brother. He finds that his brother is somewhere... when he should be in London, so he is talked into taking his brother's place at a dinner party with a family that his brother is expected to marry into, since his brother seems to have forgotten all about it.

The thing is that when their coldhearted father died, he did not settle the debts his wife Amabel had acquired... Very large debts as it turned out, as she has no idea of economy. Moreover, their father did not trust Evelyn, who was the "eldest" of the twins, as he is a rather happy-go-lucky young man around town. As a result, he put the assets of the estate in a trust until Evelyn turns 30, or until the uncle who manages the trust, feels that Evelyn has settled down enough to be trusted with the estate. Evelyn feels honor bound to settle his mother's debts, but he can't do that without selling some of the assets of the estate. The only way to get his hands on the full estate to settle those debts is to convince his uncle that he has settled down by marrying a very nice and level headed young lady - a marriage of convenience for both, as his prospective bride, Cressy, is eager to get out of the household with the new young bride of her father, who also would like to see her out of the house as well.

But, as I said, for unknown reasons, Evelyn has disappeared, and though he is expected back shortly, his twin brother Kit takes his place, meeting Evelyn's prospective bride and her family. And then is forced to host her and her domineering grandmother at his country estate... And you can guess what happens. But that happens halfway through the story. The rest is how to get everything - love, marriage, debts settled - right without a scandal.

Another delightful light-hearted story, with lots of witty dialog, great characters, and just plain fun. 

Beauvallet by Georgette Heyer  C+

Fine for what it is; a swashbuckling romance/adventure. Sir Nicholas Beauvallet is one of those Elizabethan privateers. He captures a Spanish galleon at the start of the story, carrying a sickly island governor and his beautiful daughter. In order to prove that he is more than an English pirate, he promises to restore the governor and his daughter to Spain, rather than take them back to England. Of course he immediately falls in love with his Spanish captive, and by the end of the voyage, she with him. However, keeping his word, he delivers her to Spain, and then promises to come to get her and take her to England within a year. And of course, he does so.

This is the type of story with as hero that Errol Flynn would have played to the hilt. He laughs at death, icy cool in the most dangerous situations, takes the most outrageous risks, and always wins. Indeed, Heyer pens Beauvallet almost over the top in his dashing, always equal to the situation attitude. As I said, fine for what it is, but I find that adventure stories no longer appeal to me as they once did. But if you like stories of danger and derring-do this is the book for you.

The Isle House Ghost

 

Official Release Date is Thusday, 5 February 2026 I will update this page over the next week with links to the book on various ebook store as the book becomes available.

A bonus release! Two Red Wine Agency prequel stories in one release; The Idle House Ghost, a 40K word novella, and Nine Again, a 9K word short story.

Redinal Hu, in his gentleman for hire guise as Mr Redinal Wine, is proposed as a detective to a wealthy industrialist by his inquiry agency friend, Roghy VonEv. The industrialist, Mr Colmara, is being plagued by a self-styled Compliance Agent Nine who is entering into his country home to leave a series of notes urging Mr Colmara to sign a petition for changes in government policy. Which, on the surface, seems innocent enough, except that they are being delivered at night despite the fact that the house is locked up tight. Besides being greatly annoyed by the notes and break ins, Colmara fears that the visits may soon become more than merely leaving notes. These are the days when the old order is slowly dying and the new order has yet to be determined. This struggle to define the new age within the Great Houses of Lorria, has become rather cutthroat. And thus, Mr Colmara wants these break-ins stopped and the intruder brought to justice. To this end, Red finds himself a rather unwelcomed guest at Isle House, the Isle of Autumn country home of Mr Colmara charged with capturing this Agent Nine.

Red quickly discovers that who the elusive Agent Nine is may be the more critical problem. Indeed, Mr Colmara’s son suggests, jokingly, that Agent Nine is a ghost. Red doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he’s at a loss to discover just how the notes are being delivered – a classic locked room mystery to solve. Though, at the moment, there is no body in the room. Yet.

In the bonus short story, Nine Again, Red discovers that no good deed goes unpunished. A powerful and ruthless old nemesis returns to demand that Red somehow “fix” what he did to solve the Idle House Ghost mystery in this direct sequel to The Isle House Ghost. A demand he dare not refuse.

These stories are written as a prequel to a series of fictional novels of intrigue known as the Red Wine Agency books, which played a role in the novel Chateau Clare. These two, along with the Darval-Mers Dossier, The Founders’ Tribunal, and a forthcoming new story chronicle how Redinal Hu, an ex-attorney, now majordomo of one of the Great Houses of Lorria, comes to create the Red Wine Agency, a shadow agency serving the Great Houses, or their opponents, in the secret struggles to shape the future of the Lorrian Commonwealth.

You can download The Isle House Ghost from these fine shores:

Amazon ebook $2.99

Amazon audiobook $3.99

Smashwords ebook FREE 

Vivlio ebook FREE

Google ebook FREE

Google audiobook FREE

Apple ebook FREE

Apple audiobook FREE 

Fable ebook FREE

Barnes & Noble ebook FREE

Everand ebook FREE

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 170)

 

After reading Anne of Green Gables, The Hidden Garden, and The Little Princess, as well as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, what is left?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott C+

I have read that Miss Alcott did not really want to write this book. Her publisher did. She favored more livelier and exciting subjects. Nevertheless, write it she did, for the money. Even so, she felt that the first 100 pages were pretty boring, despite praise from other readers. I think she was right. However, the story did get more interesting as it went along, especially in volume two and her publisher proved to have known what readers wanted, as it is the book Alcott is remembered for. 

This book turned out to be something other than what I had expected. I have never seen any adaptation of the story, and knew its premise only vaguely - a number of girls living with their mother, who might have been a widow, in the 1860's. Thus, I was surprised to find that the complete story spanned something like eight years with the young girls growing up and having families of their own, as well as traveling to Europe and New York for extended stays. I won't spoil the rest of the story for you, as a lot happens over the course of it that I couldn't begin to summarize.

Perhaps what I found most interesting was that one of the sisters, Jo, is an aspiring writer, very much, I suspect a fictional Miss Alcott. Her struggles as a writer offer insights into what writing involved in the 1860's. It seems that one of the major components of serious novels was moralizing. When Jo was selling her gaudy stories to the newspapers, she had to strip out all the moralizing, which troubled her. Miss Alcott didn't have to do that for this book, anyway. For all I know, she may have skipped moralizing for the more adult adventures and melodramas that she wrote. However, in this story she liberally laced it with a lot of wholesome wisdom and moralizing reflecting the tastes of the time in worthwhile novels. I'm not complaining, just noting the fact.

As I mentioned, the first hundred pages or so are rather dry and episodic in nature, but as the story goes on, and especially in volume two, the writing gets more lively, and the characters deeper. There is, as usual with stories of this period, a lot of "telling" by the writer. But I did finish the story, which you can take as a stamp of approval, though I must admit I did not fall in love with it, as it seems so many readers have before me. I had to choose between a B- and C+ and well, recalling all those long passages of wisdom and sentimentality, opted for the latter

My second title this week is something I came across browsing the Gutenberg Project... I forget what I was looking for, but I read a chapter and decided to give another old book a try.

In Pawn by Ellis Parker Butler  C

Almost every book fades away a few years after it is published. A few, for some reason, remain read and so become classics. But are there books just as good and timely as the classics but that, for some reason, just fade away like ordinary books? 

Today we have one of those books and one of those authors, whose works have faded away. According to his scant Wikipedia entry, Ellis Parker Butler wrote something like 30 books and over 2000 short stories and other pieces for magazines and newspapers from the turn the last century to the mid-1930's. His work was published alongside Mark Twain and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This is not his most famous story, that being "Pigs is Pigs," which tells you just how fleeting fame is.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have found, from my rather slight acquaintance with the forgotten fiction of the first half of the 20th century, that these books are often weird in weird ways. There are things about the way they are written, what is written about, and the characters, that just seem strange today in ways that are hard for me to put my finger on. But they're there. The question is; were they also strange when they were written? And does that explain why they faded away? Or is it simply a matter of time and changes in society?

We have one such strange book today.

This story opens with a junk dealer Harvey Redding and his son Lem. The junk dealer is a character; fat and lazy, indeed, the laziest man in or near Riverbank Iowa. He has let his junk business wither on the vine from a lack of enterprise. He is portrayed as a comical character, who, after reading pulp stories and the lives of saints, decides to become a saint, since he can't see himself as a pulp story hero, but thinks he could be a saint living a simple life of good deeds and fasting. Owing $200 to his sister, he "pawns" Lem to her to look after in her boarding house, with the promise of using the money he saves on feeding him to pay her back from the $25 a month he receives from a trust his late wife set up for him from her modest fortune. If all of this sounds like a comic novel, it is. So far.

Next we meet the three lady teachers, two of which live at the boarding house of Harvey's sister. Being single, as teachers were required to be back in the day in a lot of places, and being too ill paid to live in their own houses, they boarded.

An aside; my dairy farmer grandparents boarded the male teacher of the one-room schoolhouse just down the road for a year, probably in the 1920's or early '30's. I guess grandma didn't like him around the house, so it was only for one year. Good grief, that was a century ago. Time flies.

Not that single people could work all day and come home to do all the work that was needed to keep a household running back in those days. So they must live at home with their parents or in a boarding house until they got married and become or acquire a housewife to look after the house, and if possible a servant to help her. 

In any event, one of these teachers, Henrietta Bates, is lively, attractive, and pleasant, 40 year old, who is very romantic, and addicted to telling lies about her imaginary romance. She even borrows money from the other two teachers, in part to pay for the gifts that her fictional fiancé supposedly sends her. So far, still light fiction.

But living at the boarding house is a very nasty young man. The story goes on to recount events that develop around him, Lem, and Henrietta, all of which leads to a great deal of unpleasant drama in the boarding house, which is not comedic at all. And yet, even with these events, there are slightly comic characters woven in and out of the story, from a wise old judge, refugee Jews from Russia, and a shop owner who's family is a big name in town an boasts that he always gets what he wants.

So you have, in this story, a strange collection of rather dark drama and comic characters mixed helter-skelter together in one story. And to top it all off, you have a chapter where the author steps out from behind the curtain to muse on some of the issues of the character he's writing about, and to explain the back story of Henrietta.

This mish-mash makes the story rather weird, fitting no one pattern. While this might seem like a plus, the situation and the characters seem, well just weird. I'm not sure this weirdness comes from me being so remote from the time and place this was written, or if this story would have seemed out of the ordinary back in 1921 when it was published. And if this strangeness is perhaps why the story faded away. All I can say is that so far in my reading of these obscure books from a hundred years ago, there is usually something about them, a strangeness, that is hard to pin down, but is present, nevertheless.