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Reading: Passing Strange
Dec. 15th, 2017 06:13 pmSomeone recommended Ellen Klages' Passing Strange to me a few months ago when I was asking people to recommend comforting books, and I thought of it when I was looking for something to read earlier this week as this is definitely a time of year for comforting reading.
Having bought it months ago and not looked at the synopsis again before I started reading it, I was expecting it to be fantasy and was surprised to discover that it's mostly not; there are some fantastical elements but they're not really explored or integrated with the main story and mostly just seem to be there to provide the plot resolution and the framing story. I also hadn't realised how short it was; a novella, rather than a novel, which meant that there wasn't much time to develop the large cast of characters. However, I thought that overall it was a delightful look at the lives of queer women in San Francisco in the 1940s and felt as though it was drenched in California sunshine, which was really not at all unwelcome in a particularly cold week in an English December.
Having bought it months ago and not looked at the synopsis again before I started reading it, I was expecting it to be fantasy and was surprised to discover that it's mostly not; there are some fantastical elements but they're not really explored or integrated with the main story and mostly just seem to be there to provide the plot resolution and the framing story. I also hadn't realised how short it was; a novella, rather than a novel, which meant that there wasn't much time to develop the large cast of characters. However, I thought that overall it was a delightful look at the lives of queer women in San Francisco in the 1940s and felt as though it was drenched in California sunshine, which was really not at all unwelcome in a particularly cold week in an English December.
