three short stories, each a gem, about children.... fictionalised, stolen, and murdered....loved them all.

Arrived today. Thank you!

Sadly, time for my yearly book purge. I will look for a new home for this one.

Sending as part of the General VBB to ReallyBookish. Enjoy!

Received today. Thank you!

This brief book collects three short stories by Clare Boylan. I wasn't particularly fond of the second story, "A Little Girl, Never Out Before." I think I found it a bit too... gritty, maybe? My favorite was the first story, "A Model Daughter." All three were well-written.

A RABCK that I thought you might enjoy. As always, feel free to release unread if it is not your thing. :) I also thought this one might make a potential geocache release for you.

Thanks so much for the package of books, which arrived safely today over the icy roads! I was especially delighted with this one - I haven't had one of the Phoenix 60p books before, and as with the Penguin 60s this one should indeed make a dandy geocache release.

This slim book was a quick read, and I enjoyed the three stories very much. "A Model Daughter" is presented as something of a farce; the narrator's long-term scheme to get money from her ex-husband (now very successful an ocean away in Hollywood) by pretending to have been pregnant when they split up seems manipulative and weird at first, and then becomes increasingly hilarious when the fictional daughter's successes nudge the father into his first actual visit. Cue the narrator's desperate attempt to find someone to impersonate the alleged daughter - with very wacky results. [Granted, if this sort of thing were to be carried on in real life I'd find it appalling all around, but in-story the remote father is both willing and able to send the money, yet sufficiently disinterested not to bother visiting for twenty years, so I was able to find it more amusing, including the final plot twist.]

"A Little Girl, Never Out Before" is a very different story entirely, featuring a young girl going out for service to help support her family. That family is described as quite poor yet very, very fertile, with both young Frankie and her mother being addicted to the joys of new babies - even when there wasn't food enough to go around... Frankie, trying to adjust to life as the maid-of-all-work in a not-that-nice house, wakes up in terror because she doesn't have a babe in arms the way she did back at home. When she does get to visit home she finds that there's no room for her there anymore. But back in the big house the cook is expecting a baby, and Frankie thinks things might be looking up - until she finds out what the brutally-practical cook does with unwanted young things... [I'd been afraid that Frankie was going to wind up pregnant herself, and she very well might in the not-too-distant future, but the story wraps up with her tending to her cat's new kittens, so not *quite* as dark as it might have been. Still, it's a very wrenching look at a slice of life on the edge of poverty.]

"The Stolen Child" shifts back to farce, though with a sense of impending doom as well. Here, the narrator blithely walks off with a baby whose mother had left it outside the market in its pram. The narrator's obviously not all there, so I feared what she might do when the baby became less charming and angelic than she'd imagined at a distance; and, for a while there, it seemed things might go very badly indeed. But this one ends on an up note, at least for the baby and its mother (whose behavior seems suspiciously intentional after the fact), and I admit I laughed a lot.

The author's writing-style reminded me very much of Shirley Jackson, who can write about domestic comedy and intense psychological horror and, at times, a mix of the two. I'll be looking for more of Boylan's work!

I left this little book, bagged against the elements, in the Welcome to Pixie Hollow geocache in Litchfield, NH; hope someone enjoys it! (Since pixies were rumored to steal children at times, swapping them for changelings, I thought this was a good match.)

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

*** Released for the 2020 Clean Start for the New Year release challenge. ***

*** Released for the 2020 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***