Chronicles of St. Mary's by Jodi Taylor
Jan. 20th, 2019 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsJust One Damned Thing After Another, A Symphony of Echoes, A Second Chance, A Trail Through Time, No Time Like the Past, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, Lies, Damned Lies, and History, And the Rest Is History, An Argumentation of Historians
3/5. Tales of Max, historian who is hired by a secretive British outfit that researches history in contemporary time. I.e. time travel.
Ha, okay, so I read all nine of these books in the first two weeks of the year. (Well, I skimmed one of them). They are irritating in a lot of ways*, but did well for my purposes. That is, a snarky, occasionally amusing series that would keep my mind from anxiety-spiraling over something while not actually requiring much commitment or thought on my part. They have a particularly British what-crazy-thing-will-go-wrong-next sense of humor, and in between the swans and melodrama and general shenanigans, they actually taught me a few things about history.
*Hoo boy. How long you got? There's the tragic lesbians (the only queer people in this entire universe, I think?); and the thing where the main couple has at least one Ph.D. to their names but apparently can't manage birth control, twice; and the general lack of structure – half these novels feel like a novella with a second plot slapped on at the end; and how you can tell whenever the author couldn't figure out what to do, she just killed someone you like; oh and the extremely Eurocentric notion of worthwhile history that these books pedal. But detailing all of that would require me to take these more seriously than I did.
Content notes: Miscarriage, childhood sexual trauma, many flavors of historical mass and intimate violence.
3/5. Tales of Max, historian who is hired by a secretive British outfit that researches history in contemporary time. I.e. time travel.
Ha, okay, so I read all nine of these books in the first two weeks of the year. (Well, I skimmed one of them). They are irritating in a lot of ways*, but did well for my purposes. That is, a snarky, occasionally amusing series that would keep my mind from anxiety-spiraling over something while not actually requiring much commitment or thought on my part. They have a particularly British what-crazy-thing-will-go-wrong-next sense of humor, and in between the swans and melodrama and general shenanigans, they actually taught me a few things about history.
*Hoo boy. How long you got? There's the tragic lesbians (the only queer people in this entire universe, I think?); and the thing where the main couple has at least one Ph.D. to their names but apparently can't manage birth control, twice; and the general lack of structure – half these novels feel like a novella with a second plot slapped on at the end; and how you can tell whenever the author couldn't figure out what to do, she just killed someone you like; oh and the extremely Eurocentric notion of worthwhile history that these books pedal. But detailing all of that would require me to take these more seriously than I did.
Content notes: Miscarriage, childhood sexual trauma, many flavors of historical mass and intimate violence.