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Aug 2021
Jamaica Inn - Daphne Du Maurier – Virago, 2012
* * *
Like Dracula, this book opens with the protagonist in a coach that is travelling through a desolate landscape towards an ominous destination. In this case it is an inn with a bad reputation rather than a bat-infested castle, and the main character is a young woman, but otherwise the parallels are remarkably similar. Fortunately the storyline soon diverges into an interesting and stark look at male violence from a female perspective - one possible way to describe the premise is what if Jane Eyre had failed to redeem Mr Rochester? - but also, alas, follows Dracula in being rather less transgressive than it originally appears it will be.
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May/Jun/Jul 2016
Last year I spent seven weeks travelling in Australasia with only an e-reader for company. Here is what I took with me.

The Hallowed Hunt - Lois McMaster Bujold - Tor, 2005 (Kindle edition)
* * *
This is the third novel set in Bujold's world of Chalion but you would hardly know it. None of the characters or locations from the previous books appear - the only connection is the five-fold religion of Father, Mother, Son, Daughter and Bastard, and even this is subsumed into an older belief system involving animal spirits.

The story is engaging enough - a lady in waiting (Ijada) kills a prince when he tries to rape her, and a lord called Ingrey with a wolf problem is sent to escort her to trial but finds himself trying to murder her instead. The reasons for this are to do with an exceptionally complicated magical plot that I must admit I could not really follow in the jetlagged state in which I read it. The ideas were nice but the characters were very much stock Bujold romantic leads and overall I found the thing unmemorable.
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