Wednesday has mostly been reading short fiction

[redbird]

Specifically, I have been reading stories (and book excerpts) that are part of Jo Walton's New Decameron project. Last weekend, I also read a book:

Outcrossing, by Celia Lake, is a romance set in a magical 1920s England, with both the Great War and the "Naples plague" epidemic as recent and important to the characters. The story has people trying to find/regain their places, literal as well as figurative; another big piece of the plot is smuggling. It's also a romance, but interesting on other levels than whether/how the female and male protagonists will get together as a couple.

I enjoyed this, though I expect that a book with a recent pandemic in the background would have felt different if I wasn't reading it during the coronavirus pandemic. "Celia Lake" is the pseudonym of a friend of mine, which is how I found out she was giving this book away as a diversion during the current pandemic.

Comments

[carbonel]

I know the author also, and bought this when she first announced it. I finally got around to reading it a few months ago.

There were many things I liked about it, especially the main character. And it was readable prose that kept me going to the end. But I found it frustrating that it didn't really give me a good sense of place and setting. The history that was provided didn't fit well enough with the characters and tech level.