First Impressions Review: Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer & The Little Witch, by M. Rickert

 



Another pair of stories, available for free at the links below, this time focusing on weird occurrences in a “normal” suburban environment.

 

‘Little Free Library’ is about a girl who puts up a free library box to share books with neighbors. The books start disappearing, so she leaves a note that something should be left in exchange. The “book thief” starts leaving things that are not books: a snake sculpture, an odd leaf, a drawing of a cat. Meigan figures she’s just found the neighborhood eccentric, until a copy of ‘Defending Your Castle’ disappears, replaced with a tiny gold coin note that says:

To the librarian,

I do not know what I did to deserve the favor of the Gods, but I am grateful, so grateful, for your kindness to me. I believed our cause to be lost; I believed that I would never have the opportunity to avenge what was done to my family; now, suddenly, I have been gifted with a way forward. Blessings on you.

If you can bring me more such books, I will leave you every scrap of gold I can find

The story is very cute, and maybe a little sad, with an intriguing open ending.

 

In ‘The Little Witch’, an old woman takes note of a trick-or-treater who shows up several years in a row in the same witch outfit with red boots, but never seems to age. It is a tale that is very open to interpretation, because the old woman seems to be regarded as something of a witch herself. She seems able to accidentally curse her neighbors, who don’t trust her, keeps poisonous herbs in her cupboard, and can see the ghosts of humans and cats. But in her narration she doesn’t self-identify as a witch, and her initial concern is that the “little witch” might be malnourished. The story just keeps getting stranger from there, and the ambiguity may not be to everyone’s taste. But it has great spooky Halloween vibes, if that is what you are looking for!

Popular posts from this blog

First impressions review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Image
For the first 127 pages of this book, I thought its subtitle – ‘a novel’ – was inaccurate. What it seemed to be was a series of short stories with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous tree connections. An immigrant family travels west, carrying American chestnut seeds that take root and grow far from where the blight will strike. Adam, a probably-autistic boy, watches ants and obsesses over which trees his father chooses to plant to represent his siblings. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant tries to understand why her father killed himself under the mulberry tree in their backyard. Good, engaging stories, beautifully written, but not a novel. Then I hit Patricia Westerford. Patricia is a partially deaf girl who discovers her love of plants through her agricultural extension agent father (yes, another dad - moms just fuss in the background in this book). As part of her graduate work, she starts collecting the gases given off by trees, and comes to the startling conc...
Read more

First impressions review: Last Night At The Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo

Image
              This historical fiction follows Lily Hu, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and realizing she is in love with her classmate, Kathleen Miller. But it also has flashbacks to earlier episodes in the life of her parents and aunt that give more depth and variety to the depiction of Chinese-American life in the mid-twentieth-century. The titular Telegraph Club 1 that is both a welcoming and affirming place for Lily and Kath and a danger, given the frequency of raids and how association with leftists or homosexuals could be used as an excuse for deportation in this time period, not to mention general social ostracism. However, although there are some scary moments, this is overall a really sweet, uplifting, hopeful story.   1. Fictional, but based on several real San Francisco lesbian clubs that featured ‘male impersonators’.         ...
Read more

It oughta be a movie: Silence, by Heldris of Cornwall

Image
  This thirteenth century semi-Arthurian romance 1 featuring a female (or at least AFAB) knight contains some truly fascinating takes on gender for the period. Besides the titular knight, Silence, it also contains their parents’ love story, which is unusuall y sweet and well-balanced between the parties, even by today’s standards. All that, of course, only makes the “happy” ending more of a gut-punch! I was of course expecting that Silence would either die or go back to living as a woman, because that’s the kind of ending a medieval audience would accept. Silence doesn’t die, but…the person they are dies, in a more upsetting way than had to be the case.  However, one could easily adapt this as a more positive feminist and/or queer tale by tweaking the very end, and I’d quite like to see that done (indeed, I’m somewhat tempted to do it myself!)   1.Merlin appears in it, but Arthur does not   If you want to avoid further spoilers…just stop here a...
Read more