Thursday: birthday zoom, puttering

I walked with M. this afternoon.

I was supposed to have the rescheduled phone call with K., but she’s got more people who are transitioning to her team, so that’s not happening after all. But I’m super happy for her. She’s finally getting better people on her team, which will be so much better all around.

I vacuumed the downstairs and the stairs from the first to the second floor. The stairs, in particular, really, really needed it.

Also! I had A. sit next to me and we read Matt Levine together. This is time consuming and somewhat exhausting, but she stayed interested and understood for the most part. I don’t normally do this, because homework, but no homework! Yay!

_Darkness Becomes Her_, Kelly Keaton

Back in the middle of December, 2017, I bought this on kindle. I had enjoyed the hell out of the Charlie Madigan books five years earlier, and somehow found out that Kelly Keaton was Kelly Gay writing under a new name.

Alas! Not as much of a fan of this. I tried reading it repeatedly, and at no point did I feel like I was gonna _have_ to DNF it. There is a scene that is a Did a Magick Thing and Got a Vision of the Past that includes a rape; the context is such that I’m in no way inclined to hold that against Keaton, because she’s using Greek mythology, and that kind of stuff is all over Greek mythology. (Altho definitely a reason why I increasingly avoid modern novels which rework Greek mythology, because I’m like, why, do we really have to keep doing this.)

There’s a lot about the book that I feel like ought to make it appealing — the New Orleans setting, notably. However, it just does not particularly work for you. Reviews suggest that this series _does_ work for other people, so please don’t take this as a It’s a Horrible Book type review. It’s not a horrible book. I just didn’t connect with it the way I had with her Charlie Madigan series writing as Kelly Gay. This is the first entry in a series; I doubt I will read more.

It was interesting, tho, because I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of vacation settings (settings familiar because the audience probably has vacationed there, or aspires to vacation there) in novels. This is definitely another example of exactly that.