All of the things: A Review of Farthing, Jo Walton

My brain feels like the inside of the family junk drawer; thoughts tossed in amongst dried up pens, loose change, broken bits of crayons all hidden beneath unpaid bills and random keys to unknown doors. The month of May has been interesting and not in a "what a great reading month I had interesting" but a "I quit my job interesting".  I quit my job, I really, truly cross-my- heart did.  I just started giggling hysterically and drinking vodka all at the same time while resisting the urge to go out and find another job right now in my housecoat. This is who I am now, the girl with no job, and the ability to reboot myself into whatever the hell I want.  I could be a silly monkey (maybe not), or a tree pruner (why not, there are trees everywhere), a full-time writer (have NO idea what I would write on about) or maybe I could go with being me and see where that leads. I am Dune Girl, the jobless blogger who suddenly has a lot of time on her hands to read all of the things.

I am over there, under the willow reading all of the things.

While it is tempting to fuel the fires of speculation and expound on a life in which I will be found in a library equipped with a rolling ladder and patio doors leading out onto a rose garden with hedges and champagne chilling by the perfect bench under a canopy of maple leaves, in truth my near future will be closer to the mundane than the idyllic. Sometimes a Mom just wants to be a Mom and so the child has been withdrawn from preschool so the two of us can partake in a mommy/son summer love-fest. Hopefully the love-fest persists, I see an unraveling by mid-July into some type of cage match.

Wonderful just wonderful, but please let us not stray from what is of importance, all of the things that I will read for the rest of my life; the dear hubby thinks this is a short-term sabbatical, the poor dear, he really is no match for me. My adulterous affair with the mystery novel has run it's salacious course and I have returned to the Mothership. I picked up Jo Walton's Small Change series and am nursing myself slowly back to science fiction health. 

For those of you unbeknownst to the writings of Jo Walton I draw your attention to my post Sunny-Yellow Bookcase.  Her Small Change series is speculative fiction wrapped inside a murder mystery.  The series presents a Britain that has has signed a peace treaty with Hitler; this is a world at the dawn of truth to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi's with the dissemination of those truths slowly being leaked into the public scope. These are deceivingly simple books written in Jo's frank and personal style that as you progress reveal layers of complexity. They are the perfect example of how best to explore the possibilities that science fiction permits while peppering the plot with the tried and true rules of the detective plot. This is the series for all you science fiction naysayers who are not quite ready to sleep with the alien or befriended a sentient planetoid intent on destroying the known universe.