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I think the only word for this book is “delightful.” In a standard-issue medievaloid fantasy setting, a teenage apprentice baker and wizard finds herself thrust into the unexpected role of saving the city-state from plots and foreign invasion. With the help of an animated gingerbread man and a magical familiar in the form of a sourdough culture named Bob.  I mean, what more do you need to know? The protagonist is believably complex and flawed and the baking-based magic (indeed, the general premise of how magic works in the world) is well-realized and woven into the plot and its resolution. I may be biased in my love of this book because the quarantine initiated me into the Sourdough Tribe. But then again, I think it’s just that good.

One of the interesting things Manion does in this book -- though I believe she attributes the practice to someone previous -- is using "trans" as in "to trans gender" as a verb. (I don't think trans has quite made it through all the grammatical parts of speech yet, but it's worked its way through preposition to adjective to noun, so verb was a reasonable next step.) Sometimes a particular bit of imagery or re-framing can click an idea into place, and trans-as-verb did that for me.

I've been working on how to express and explain a unifying historical concept between female same-sex desire and trans-masculine identities and performance. The current view of sexuality and gender as being completely independent axes becomes a hindrance to understanding how people in history understood their own and other lives. It also encourages the treatment of historical persons as the "property" of specific modern identities--and those identities as a scarce and valuable resource. It's part of what encourages people to see a sharp divide in history between "femme-femme" love and desires/relationships that evoke a masculine-feminine dynamic.

If "trans" is an adjective or a noun, it tends to be treated as an either/or category. One is either trans or cis. A binary. But if "trans" is a verb, then it's an action that can be done to different degrees, either intermittently or continuously. One can trans gender a little or a lot, and it was still transing gender if one stops doing it. It's no longer a defined border to be crossed; a different territory to be inhabited. (My imagery is flashing on the classical Roman regional definitions of trans-alpine and cis-alpine Gaul: territories defined by their relationships both to Rome and to the mountain barrier.) Viewed in this context, one can understand any type of behavior, presentation, or inherent characteristic that does not align with a culture's established gender archetypes as performing the action of "transing" without the need to make a judgment about whether that action has effected a change in the person's category status.

This is a way of framing the idea that I need to think about some more and explore further, but I think it could be very useful for discussing historic lives without hitting some of the trip-lines that move the discussion into arguing over who "owns" those lives.

Being a massive Jane Austen fan, I’m also something of a sucker for spin-offs that do fun things with her characters. Though I have strong opinions on some of the ones that didn’t work as well for me. This is a fun, reasonably fluffy, series in which Mr. and Mrs. Darcy play amateur detectives while encountering all manner of characters from other Austen novels in the context of cozy murders. The writing is competent, though not scintillating (and without a serious attempt to mimic Austen’s own prose). There were a few plot holes one could drive a four-in-hand through and some of the character motivations were shaky, but that’s been an issue throughout the series and yet I keep reading them. This is the sixth in the series, of which there are seven in total, and as the title suggests, brings in the characters from Persuasion, as well as a few other Austen-based side characters.

Lately I’ve been plucking books almost randomly off my to-be-read bookcase (which really needs to be organized so it’s not quite so random). I’d rather forgotten about picking up this one. A somewhat dated (with respect to gender politics) short gothic with mystery elements, set in an ancient villa and the Etruscan catacombs beneath it. Archaeology, ancient mysteries, terrible family secrets, lots of peril that might have been avoided if people talked to each other more about the odd things they knew about the villa and its former inhabitants. A great study in re-interpreting the protagonist’s understanding as new facts come to light (with a chance for the reader to be a step and a half ahead of her in figuring out what’s going on). The introduction by Paul di Filippo accurately describes it as a bit of a blend of Daphne du Maurier and Thomas Burnett Swann.