Ten Second Reviews

The House with Chicken Legs

By Sophie Anderson

This is like a middle school reader version of Baba Yaga, where she adopts like an eleven year old girl and then shit happens.  I will be very honest: I did not finish this one and only sort of limply flipped through the final pages (Baba never comes back?!).  Among other things, a kid from the Lake District in England tells our heroine Marinka that he is really into " soccer". It brought me in mind of the first Harry Potter book, in which things just got semi-randomly changed for an American audience (because we do not know what a philosopher is, I suppose) and that was twenty-three years ago (sniff) and we've all come a long way since then, and frankly a little cross-cultural contamination is good for the soul anyway.  Let's raise some fricking cosmopolitans.  Anyway, this may be impolite, but I want to shout out to Nine Witch Tales which is actual witch horror for middle school readers, because back in the 60s they didn't care about "mental health" or "not terrifying young readers".

Fatal Inheritance

By Rachel Rhys

This one was certainly nicely atmospheric - and I don't mean it's suspenseful or thrilling, but that it feels nicely of the time and place, i.e., 1948 post-war French Riviera.  I went along for the ride, but I did have some bugaboos: Eve's a doormat until she needs to be otherwise for the sake of the plot, and then she'll quietly subside again.  I never really got a feel for her personality - is she chafing, is she demoralized, is she seizing her opportunity here, what is it?

And the solution to the mystery bugged too.  So her mysterious inheritance is basically unrelated to the "accidents" which keep befalling her, since those are just about the lost Nazi art smugglers who want to get into the house.  And the art is in Guy Lester's house because...? I never made the connection of when and how it got buried behind the wall, and why it needed to be removed conveniently when Eve was still in the house.  Smugglers really demand punctuality and courtesy when removing stolen items, I guess.

But the tagline, "She didn’t have an enemy in the world…until she inherited a fortune." isn't really true: she didn't have an enemy because she inherited a fortune, she sort of just managed to wander into a criminal ring simultaneously with inheriting a fortune.  It's not a very surprising mystery (you know who is mysterious and angry but falling in love with her, and who is mysterious and nice but secretly using her very early on, and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing that Guy Lester did is clear about halfway into the book, although they save the "revelation" for much later) but it's not a bad piece of fiction, and it's such an interesting setting that the novelty at least, should keep you going until the end.