Wednesday reading--wildly disparate!

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies--which nearly happens! Tacy gets diphtheria! But they end up cutting huge hanks of hair off, not single locks, which means they end up needing haircuts. And then they make a club focused on being good, but they're so intrigued by the penance they invent for if they do bad things that it doesn't work out as planned. I read sections of that out to Wakanomori, it was so funny.

And there was a description of Tib that stuck with me:

Tib was tiny but she was never scared.
"Come on," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." And she flew ahead like a little yellow feather.

That: like a little yellow feather.

And then I read another short story in the next issue of my gift subscription to the Sun, "Longshanks" by Samuel Jensen.

( below the cut are spoilers for this story )

It's all very litfic. But it *was* well written, and for all my criticisms, I enjoyed reading it.