Currently Reading #5

A graphic novel riff on Gothic romance!!

Hi, friends,

I saw two ermines yesterday! Fingers crossed that they stick to smaller prey and leave our 9,000 squirrels alone, but nature’s gonna do what nature’s gonna do. Also, holy cow, they are so unbelievably gorgeous.

But they’re also basically tiny little Hannibal Lecters and I don’t trust them to not eat my face, so I keep my distance.

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From Wikipedia, an example of the Hannibal Lecterness of the ermine

“The stoat does not dig its own burrows, instead using the burrows and nest chambers of the rodents it kills. The skins and underfur of rodent prey are used to line the nest chamber.”

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I’m still on a big comics kick, and just picked up The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, by Shaenon K. Garrity and Christopher Baldwin, and by the end of the the third page I knew that I wouldn’t be getting anything else done today. Because this heroine is my people:

Selection from The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor

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Haley is heading home—through the pouring rain, naturally—with her pile of Gothic romances, and she sees what she thinks is someone drowning in the river. So she heads in to save him, and before she knows it, she’s been catapulted into another reality… a more GOTHIC reality.

I particularly love that she’s entirely delighted by this turn of events, as well as by how much the various people she meets fit into various Gothic archetypes. AND she comments on the various anachronisms she notices—never in a complaining way, she’s delighted by that as well.

I love crabby heroines, but I also love over-the-top cheerful ones?? Always about the extremes with me, heh.

Anyway, SUCH FUN!! (Or, well, so far—I’ve only barely just started Chapter Two.)

More soon,
Leila