On the last day of the Friends of the Library book sale, I picked up a lot of books that looked appealing to stock the swap shelf in the cafe -- this was one of them.

Before releasing it I glanced through the stories and found none of them compelling. In particular, "The Harper's Daughter" by Barbara Samuel was a disappointment. I've read a number of people (most recently Danielle Summers) cogently arguing that romance, with its insistence on the right to a happy ending, is inherently feminist. So Samuel didn't have a bad idea when she decided to explicitly point out the misogynist implications of the way that the story of Deirdre is usually told while rewriting it as a romance. Too bad that the result is just painfully badly written!

On a bench near Sage Hall.

Found on bench near Sage Hall.