I was about twenty pages into The Night Ends with Fire by K.X. Song when I realized the novel was a knockoff. If you're a fan of Disney, the story of Mulan is probably very familiar: girl protects her family by pretending to be a boy and joining the army. This book is about the same character, but her motivations are all dark and negative, and nothing you could really call heroic. She's not protecting her family, she's abandoning them to her drug addict dad to avoid a marriage to a cruel man he arranged. This Mulan is angry and greedy and all about herself, which is fine. That's pretty much the modern lifestory these days. The writing is quite deft, and the pacing is consistent. The author has the skills to write well, and does. I just kept getting sidelined by the knockoff aspects. The main character is not sympathetic or even likeable, and since I am a female who served in the military I should have at least identified with her. Instead I wished she'd...
While I'm brooding on my vintage linen project, I decided to turn this basket of vintage fabric that I used to make the September tote for my calendar project into a small quilt. Back in September I cut half of the fabric into strips, so I pieced the leftovers into blocks. Here's the quilt top arrangement. Stay tuned to see how I make the backing out of the rest of the scrap.