Margaret Sidney, Five Little Peppers Grown Up. I love the Peppers. They're all so earnest and so sweet and oh, so very good. They're also a bit over-dramatic - the smallest thing is the end of the world. And Phronsie (the youngest) at 13 acts very much the same way Phronsie did at 3. But once you've acccepted that, it's nice to make a visit to such lovely, innocent people.
Mrs. Molesworth, The Cuckoo Clock. Another piece of classic children's literature. But unlike the charmingly over-sweet Peppers, Mrs. Molesworth's Griselda is sulky, demanding, obtuse, and petulant pretty much all through the book, and with no reason, obvious or otherwise, to justify such behavior. And since there's no reason for the original flaws, there's no lesson to be learned when she finally (on the last page) learns to conquer them.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Midnight Harvest. Sadly, Saint-Germain simply doesn't translate to the modern era. The elaborateness of his ruses to disguise his vampiric identity, the separation of his various holdings ... it just doesn't hold up in the more connected world of the mid-20th century. Nor, frankly, does his Old World courtly manner. And with those gone, so is much of the character's magic.
Louis L'Amour, Comstock Lode. I tend to like L'Amour's longer books slightly less than I do the shorter ones, and this was no exception. But there was a lot of interesting mining detail in this one, a fairly complex plot with a decent payoff, and the characters were solid L'Amours.
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