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Title: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
Author: Betty MacDonald
Length: 119 pages

Having never ready any of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, I picked up a trio of them when I saw them at the thrift store. This one, the first, is a little moralistic, but good clean fun and lessons for kids.

Verdict: Recommended.

Title: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
Author: Betty MacDonald
Length: 126 pages

Book two of... five, apparently. I like this one less well than the first because what had been psychological solutions suddenly gets replaced by magic powder and the like. Bleh. And my distaste for this stymies me, because I love books about magic. But the last story reverts to the form of the first book, which I liked better.

Verdict: Half-hearted Reccommendation.

Title: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm
Author: Betty MacDonald
Length: 128 pages

Book three reverts to the no-magic style of the first book, though that is somewhat tempered by the humanly intelligent animals. Still, I liked this better than the second book.

Verdict: Recommended.

Title: Half-Human
Author Editor: Bruce Coville
Length: 207 pages

Anthologies are fun, because you get taken a lot of different places. I'd actually already read three of the stories in this volume, but that's okay because the others were still new to me, and took me to sights and imaginings I'd never before seen.

Verdict: Recommended.

Title: Dracula in London
Author Editor: P.N. Elrod
Length: 257 pages

Another anthology. I picked this up on the strength of the editor, who... she's disappeared from her online presence a couple years ago. She hasn't published anything new, either. I wish I knew what happened to her. But in this volume I got to read a new-to-me short story of hers, as well as several other riffs on what might've happened while Dracula was in London. Some of the stories are scary, some are funny, some are just baffling. I found myself amused by references to Good Omens (though the Crowley in this story is a different one...), and by multiple stories riffing on The Pirates of Penzance. :)

Verdict: Recommended. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I haven't read Dracula since high school.

Title: Valour and Vanity
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Length: 393 pages

Book four of this series. I had a bit of a harder time getting into this one, but once the action picked up, the volume was hard to put down. The beginning of the novel, I kept reading and seeing ghosts of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And the reviews and cover text all compare it to Ocean's Eleven, which I've never seen. Still, a good read and I look forward to the final novel in the series.

Verdict: Recommended.

Date: 2015-08-29 10:44 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
(I can't seem to remember my LJ password to login, but this is [livejournal.com profile] xianghua)

I just finished the first of the Kowal novels and it was a fun read- kind of meandered along and then the last 20% or so went BLORP all by at once. Do they all do that? (Also does Vincent have any longer sentences in the next book?)

Date: 2015-08-29 04:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sakon76.livejournal.com
No, they get better at that. Though maybe I should say the area with the pacing problem varies from book to book? Vincent does get (slightly) more loquacious as he relaxes, though, so that at least is largely a flaw of the first novel.

Date: 2015-09-05 08:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] spiderlove.livejournal.com
I used to love the Mrs Piggle Wiggle books when I was a kid. Until I realized it was like this whole revenge against children setup and the adults were never the assholes, which struck me as horribly unfair. XD I wonder how I'd feel if I went back to read them again...

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