Book completed

Wild Life, by Molly Gloss. It's 1905, and Charlotte Bridger Drummond is a successful writer of dime novels about spunky feminist women who have grand adventures. She lives with her five sons and a housekeeper on an island in the Columbia River near the town of Skamokawa (pronounced Skuh-MOCK-uh-way), which is midway between Portland and the ocean. When the housekeeper's granddaughter goes missing, Charlotte abruptly finds herself searching for the girl in the forests south of Mt St Helens, near the logging camp where the girl's father was working, and which he'd taken her to visit. Then Charlotte gets lost in the forest.

Molly Gloss is an extraordinary writer, and this book shows it well. We have Charlotte's diary, essays she's written, profiles of people she's known, and highly entertaining extracts from her novels. She's not always likeable, but she seems very real, and always interesting, and her experiences are sometimes profound. This is the second time I've read this book, and I'm very glad I did.

More Magic

Today, DG drove J and D to Hillsboro, west of Portland, for a Magic tournament that qualifies the top two players (out of 32) for a larger event in February. D was one of the winners! He's now qualified for three such events in a row, starting with the one in Dallas; they're all three qualified for one in DC in October.

I found an alternate route that they could take to Hillsboro if they had concerns about Portland traffic on the interstate - the road they took instead was quite lovely in terms of scenery. Unfortunately, D got pretty motion-sick, and it took about 2.5 hours for him to feel okay again.