Rereading The Ladies of Grace Adieu

[prodigy]

"He is blushing," said Jonathan Strange, raising his eyes from the newspaper. "We have come, Henry, with the sole purpose of seeing Miss Parbringer (of whom you write so much) and when we have seen her, we will go away again."

"Indeed? Well, I hope to invite Mrs Field and her niece to meet you at the earliest opportunity."

"Oh, there is no need to trouble yourself," said Strange, "for we have brought telescopes. We will stand at bedroom windows and spy her out, as she goes about the village."

Strange did indeed get up and go to the window as he spoke. "Henry," he said, "I like your church exceedingly. I like that little wall that goes around the building and the trees, and holds them all in tight. It makes the place look like a ship. If you ever get a good strong wind then church and trees will all sail off together to another place entirely."

Jonathan Strange is basically from another planet. This is why he is the best. Regency-set books are full of male characters who are irritating macho douchebags dark and brooding, or at best, manly and honorable (yawn); if only more of them were complete space cadets. He's like the lost, ginger Lovegood.

Comments

[prodigy]

TAG META IS THE WORST, THE WORRSSSSTTT. To be honest, so is Tumblr meta in general; I wish people tagged things "shitty but not technically offensive analysis of something that isn't wrong enough for you to argue with without looking like a douche with no tact so you'll have to grit your teeth and ignore it and possibly paste the link to someone you know and complain pettily in the IM window" so I could Tumblr Savior it.

"Like Neverwhere but actually good" is so much of what I want out of urban fantasy and never get.

[gogollescent]

HAHAHAHA. Yeah, if only. Alternatively, if only it were possible to pick at people's analyses relentlessly without looking like a douche. And being a douche, I guess. :( I would be on that.

Among my first experiences with explicitly labelled Urban Fantasy was Holly Black's ~~grody faerie underworld stuff, which, followed up shortly after by Neverwhere, gave me the sadly misplaced conviction that a considerable amount of urban fantasy would deal with shifting halfworlds clinging to the underside of this one and competing present-day mythologies, and that somewhere in the mass there was therefore something that was bound to be awesome, and then… this story doesn't really have a conclusion, except perhaps "I tripped over Harry Dresden once and fell flat on my face." Alas. It was probably painful.