Halloween montage

 In 2012, Eric was Captain America, and Faith was Cleopatra.

Then, in 2013, Faith was Pikachu while Eric was, once again, Captain America.

In 2014, Faith was Pikachu again, and Eric was Emmet from The Lego Movie.

Book review: The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2015 was The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley.  Once a month, I'm offered a free e-book to download for my Kindle as an Amazon Prime member, and this was one of them for February.  Many months, none of the selections piques my interest, but for the low, low price of free, I was willing to give this one a try.

The book is set in the First Bank of Cleveland, both in 1978, when it's a bustling high-rise, and in 1998, when it's a derelict building, on the verge of renovation.  Our heroines are two, as well: Beatrice, a young secretary in 1978, and Iris, a recently-minted structural engineer drawing up a floor plan for the building's owners.  The two women are at either end of a mystery involving the sudden closure of the bank and the fate of unclaimed safety deposit boxes.

This was an exciting read.  There was one error in which one of the protagonists was called by the other one's name.  There were a couple of completely unnecessary sex scenes, which were doubly annoying due to the Hollywood/romance novel convention that the sexiness of an encounter is inversely proportional to the physical discomfort its location involves (desks, kitchen counters, stairs, etc.).  In this case, it was the bare tile floor of a bathroom.  The bathroom is directly off an office with normal furniture, presumably including some sort of couch, but, no, they go at it on the hard, cold tile floor. That can't be comfortable for either one of them.

The resolution of the mystery doesn't quite manage to measure up to my expectations, and I felt the author pulled her punches in exactly who ends up dead.  Still, it was an enjoyable read.  This is D. M. Pulley's first novel, and I'll certainly give an interested glance at her second.

Book review: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2015 was Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This was Wilder's "first draft" of the Little House series.  The South Dakota Historical Society Press published it in December 2014 and immediately sold out of the first printing.  Did they really think they wouldn't?  Tommy ordered it for me at Christmas, but it ended up being a birthday present, as the order wasn't filled until March, when they finally started to catch up to demand.

If you've read the Little House books (and if you haven't, go read them first before turning to this), there will be very little to surprise you here, and if you've done any supplemental reading on Wilder's life, such as Donald Zochert's biography, there will be even less.  To me, the greatest value of this book is the revelation that Wilder's first draft was, in fact, so similar to the finished product, not the barely-literate oral history that Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed into a literary classic and patronizingly allowed her mother to take the credit for, as many literary historians have asserted. Their evidence for doing so seems to be outright bigotry: that a woman who lived virtually her whole life as a housewife on a farm couldn't possibly have produced a work of such talent or lasting influence.  Much more likely that it was the extensively-traveled, feminist, divorced daughter, though it's puzzling why she never broke out any of that literary genius on a book published under her own name.