Quenby Olson

Miss Mildred Percy is a spinster aunt who has spent years living with her married sister and caring for her sister’s children. She inherits a trunk full of an odd collection of books and rocks and papers. The local vicar offers to help her sort through some of it, and so it is at the vicarage that one of the stones hatches and a most curious creature emerges…

This is written in a style prone to lengthy parenthetical digressions mid-sentence, and Your Mileage May Vary as to whether this is humorous or tedious. I found it amusing, for the most part, and only occasionally exhausting. I plan on reading the sequel at some point.

Seventeen years she’d lived beneath this roof, and yet she still felt as if she were a guest, a transient creature shunted up into the smallest available room, cursed to continually reside in some betwixt and between realm where she was neither family nor servant. Like a fairy world from a book of children’s tales. Only without the fairies. Or the magic.

… (altro)

Miss Percy’s Travel Guide to Welsh Moors and Feral Dragons -Q.Olson
Audible performance by Zara Ramm
3 stars

Dragons, plural.

More eggs crack and the adventure continues. I began to wonder if Miss Percy and Co. would ever get a lucky break. They do occasionally, but it doesn’t last. However, onward and upward. There are new characters both good and evil. There’s just a touch of magical intervention, a lot of humor, and a deepening acknowledgement of the romance between Miss Percy and the Vicar.

It’s all good fun and there’s more to come. There will be another book.… (altro)

Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons - Q.Olson
Audio performance by Zara Ramm
4 stars

Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote about the plight of the genteel spinster sister in her 1926 Lolly Willows. Aunt Lolly spent years as the unpaid nanny and governess to her nieces and nephews. In late middle age she was fed up and moved to a country estate where she became a witch. Lolly’s a bit frightening and although the story made a feminist statement, it was depressing. What Lolly really needed was a dragon.

Miss Percy also has the bleak spinster existence. She’s spent 17 years as an unpaid governess in her younger sister’s home. She is severely downtrodden and does little to defend herself. Fortunately, her life takes an upward, adventurous turn when she receives an odd inheritance from an eccentric uncle. A dragon egg that quickly becomes a baby dragon. She is also fortunate in her new friends, the Vicar Mr. Wiggans and his housekeeper.(So much better than Lolly’s pact with the devil.) Her life will never be the same. It will be so much better.

This was a fun book. I loved that it was read by Zara Ramm who has always done such a great job with Jodi Taylor’s St. Mary’s series. She had exactly the right tone for this book. It was exactly the light entertainment the I needed between more serious books.… (altro)