Tag: reading

Soulla Christodoulou, A Palette of Magpies (Kingsley Publishers 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197080981-a-palette-of-magpies?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=c7Ct51U78m&rank=1

Painting the return back to joy

Judith receives a second picture postcard, colourful watercolours—a pair of magpies, ‘Two for joy.’—no stamp, no signature. The first had been ‘One for sorrow’. An art teacher and collector, she admires the brushwork. Someone was watching her. Would her best friend Louise across the Cotswolds lane have seen anything? She didn’t ask the gossipy ladies at the post office.
She’d left home young, after ‘the dreadful incident’. She inherited the cottage after her parents’ death, but retirement was boring until these cards started coming. Now, with endless time to paint, she has no inspiration. This is her ‘new timetable of life’, says Lou.
Kerry remains locked in her room, grieving after a miscarriage. Judith had lost a child, too. She cheers her up with a basket full of paints. Judith forms the belief that the postcards are instructing her to give people joy.
Another postcard. ‘Three for a girl.’ She identifies her next beneficiary—Maja, the depressed Polish teenager.
‘Four for a boy’. Next is the vicar and his unconventional family. Judith begins to take her own advice to ‘escape the unkind, hard-shelled chrysalis of [her] own making’.
‘Five for silver. Six for gold.’ Relationships among the villagers develop at the Summer Fête.
‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’ Old secrets are revealed, and something new happens in Judith’s timetable of life. Someone is determined to give Judith back her joy.
Beautiful writing, languid life in a sleepy village, poignant and psychological, full of love. Judith notes: ‘Grief stay[s] with you, under your skin, behind your eyes, in your heart and in your thoughts.’ In (semi) retirement myself, I got into this protagonist. Her emergence from the chrysalis is profoundly satisfying.

Carson Siu, The Illustrated Book of Japanese Lore: Your Comprehensive Guide to Japan’s Rich Culture, Tales, Mythology, Festivals, Folk Art and Urban Legends (Kindle 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237356356-the-illustrated-book-of-japanese-lore?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=1pcbmrSyXG&rank=2

A comprehensive illustrated encyclopedia of Japanese lore

The book is an encyclopedia, codified into kami (gods and goddesses), yōkai (spirits and monsters), yūrei (ghosts), folktales and legends, rituals, festivals and customers, folk art and symbols and urban legends.
You will find in here absolutely every example of lore, from Momotarō to the 13th Floor, each listed with their names also in Japanese kanji and a manga-like colour illustration.
Nothing in human ghoststories could be spookier than Japanese yōkai and yūrei, and each type has a specific name—Rokurokubi (stretching neck), Hitotsume-kozō (one-eyed boy monk), Kuchizake-onna (slit-mouth woman).
Some of them derive from tales of females wronged in life or killed unjustly, like Okiku, the plate-counting girl, who in life was unjustly accused of losing her master’s plate and killed, destined throughout eternity to count for that tenth plate. Her counting ‘ichi-mai, ni-mai’, never reaching ten, drives humans mad. The enduring tales often illustrate Confucian or Buddhist principles such as good deeds bring rewards.
Japanese ghosts are class-based, too. Goryō (honourable spirit) are haunted spirits of samurai and noblemen.
Traditions like the Feb 3rd Setsubun are described, where people throw roasted soybeans (mamemaki) out the door, crying ‘Oni was soto. Fuku wa uchi’ (demons out, fortune in) and eat the same number of beans as their age.
These aren’t just old-time legends. Contemporary internet virals like Backrooms and The Ring are also terrifying and play on modern-day Japanese horrors like loneliness and urban decay.
And if you’re interested in further following the creature or custom in Japanese culture and history, each includes a paragraph on ‘cultural significance’.
This would be a useful resource for people playing video games that feature Japanese anime figures. Each entry includes a paragraph on ‘visual and behaviour’ characteristics, which would be handy for defining RPG powers. Pick your avatar. I’ll take Bake-danuki (shape-shifting racoon) or Teketeke (vengeful torso) or Tābo Baachan (Turbo Granny).
I lived in Japan during my twenties, and this book made me nostalgic. It’s educated me on a lot of things I saw then but knew little about at the time.

Donna Brown, The Shattered Truce (Starling Wood Press 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219475967-the-shattered-truce?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19

A psychological olde-world tale of three families, a witch and a dragon

Ebba and Hilda, prospective mothers-in-law, negotiate a betrothal between Elsa and Gareth, son of the chief who’d killed Annerin’s husband, who’d cast them out of March, a ‘poor little backwater clinging to a legend because it had nothing else’.
Annerin tells the children the story of the sword with the black rose. Was it the lost sword of Glendorrig? No, the rose would have been red. I understood much too late that there were, in fact, three swords.
Annerin urges Fran to speak his feelings for Elsa before the betrothal is official.
Maya believes there is a dragon in the forest. Annerin encounters the beast and scares it away with the sword. Gareth is lying unconscious. Fran rescues them, but Annerin worries that no one will believe her. Gareth’s father Lukas clearly does not, and Fran raises the sword as if to defend his mother Annerin against the perceived threat. Ebba is afraid ‘blood will be spilt’.
As old grievances coincide with new, it is the innocent who pay the price, and suspense heats up as Gareth and Fran both try to sort everything out ‘once and for all’.
There is heavy backstory conflict between the families, which we are fed skilfully, bit by bit. Likewise, we learn the story of when Arete the witch came to the gate. And there’s some mystery about what’s in the ‘packet’. I love how it doesn’t tell us too much, waiting for the emotional impact to hit.
I felt the dragon was a metaphor for the unspoken hostility, the ‘unfinished business [that] stalked March’. Only little Maya tells the truth. Then, the dragon, too, becomes a character involved in the drama.
It’s well written, and once you get the hang of who belongs to which family, you get hooked into the drama.
This is the Chronicles of Eruthin Book 1, and I’d love to read the sequels.