Reading: I think I'll be sticking with the Maitland. Publisher's Weekly says this:
Desperate to outrun the Black Death ravaging England during the sodden summer of 1348, nine disparate souls band together in this harrowing historical, which infuses a Canterbury Tales scenario with the spectral chill of an M. Night Shyamalan ghost story. Maitland (The White Room) gives each of the travelers a potentially devastating secret. How did narrator Camelot, a glib-tongued peddler of false relics and hope, really come by that hideously scarred face? What is magician Zophiel hiding inside his wagon? And just who is Narigorm, the spooky albino girl whose readings of the runes are always eerily on target? As the nine strangers slog cross-country through the pestilential landscape, their number shrinking one by one, they come to realize that what they don't know about each other might just kill them.
Library Journal Review says this:
In England, 1348 was a very bad year: rains fell from Midsummer's Day to Christmas, causing crops to rot in the fields, and the plague swept through the country, killing and displacing high and low alike. Told from the viewpoint of Camelot, a peddler of relics, Maitland's story twists and turns deftly as a motley crew of travelers seek to hide their secrets from one another. Held together more by fear than comradeship, they wend their way across the south of England, seeking lasting refuge from the uncertainties of life. Like the pilgrims of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to which this book has been likened, each of the travelers has a tale to tell. Those tales intertwine and unfold in a page-turning novel in which hope seeks to balance despair despite everything. Maitland, whose previous novel, The White Room, was released in the United Kingdom 12 years ago, has put the intervening years to good use. This novel vividly evokes the landscape of 14th-century England without putting too many 21st-century interpretations on actions and events.
This book was just published and has 465 pages. Here's the first paragraph:
The Midsummer Fair
They say that if you suddenly wake with a shudder, a ghost has walked over your grave. I woke with a shudder on that Midsummer's Day. And although I had no way of foreseeing the evil that day would bring to all of us, it was as if in that waking moment, I felt the chill of it, glimpsed the shadow of it, as if something malevolent was hovering just out of sight.
TV: America's Next Top Model and Ghosthunters. Yes, I know I'm killing little grey cells.
Just finalized plans to go to Denver Oct. 23-24 to talk to Regis people about the class next summer. They're paying for plane ticket, hotel, chauffering me around and some kind of honorarium. Good thing because I'll be out a day and a half of pay (leaving the afternoon of the 23rd). I hope this is a good thing. A little bit nervous. And it will mean a lot of work; writing the workbook probably for sure.
Tonight Steve is helping a shooting class. I'll walk Tug and do the regular evening stuff. Hope to have time to do some reading as I'm a bit overwhelmed right now.
Gotta go...
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
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