I haven’t been doing a lot of serious fiction reading* in the last few weeks.  Mostly I’ve been lunging for escapism.  Which in my case, if it isn’t Georgette Heyer, is probably fantasy.**  My goodness—or rather my badness—there’s a lot of pustulant rubbish out there.***

I’d slogged through a terrible amount of redolent garbage† before I decided to give myself a break with an author I already knew.  I think this is Rickman’s first book for pre-adults;  I’ve been devotedly reading his Merrily Watkins series since THE WINE OF ANGELS came out in ’98 †† and waiting for the next one I’ve read most of his other books too.  He writes ‘low’ fantasy:  it’s this world, but not as we know it, Jim.†††

Marco’s Pendulum is laid in Glastonbury, which is a promising beginning:  Rickman has done Glastonbury before and he’s very good on both the real presence of the place and the sometimes rather strange people it attracts.‡  Marco is a London teenager whose mum has just gone off on a business trip snarling over her shoulder at his dad . . . and his dad, who has a girlfriend to get back to, barely waits for his wife’s airplane to leave the ground before he’s hustling Marco down to Glastonbury to stay with his mum’s parents for the summer.  Whom Marco has never met.  Whom his mum never mentions.

Who may, possibly, be rather strange.  Or even very strange.

Rosa is also on to have a bad summer.  Her dad used to be a policeman, but he heard another call, and retrained to be a priest.  He’s been made curate in Glastonbury in the hopes that his old-fashioned copper instincts will make short work of the local lunatic fringe.  He is very, very definite that all that psychic woo-woo stuff is either imaginary or the work of the devil:  which means Rosa cannot tell him about the ghost monk she sees in her bedroom at night, or that she’s sure that something really awful happened in the empty shop under their flat:  something like, you know, black magic, maybe.

And then there are a bunch of dubious-looking businessmen who want to start up a seriously creepy theme park called Avalon World.  They say it will modernize Glastonbury, create jobs, boost tourism and generally enliven the economy.  But there’s something really wrong about these guys . . .

I thoroughly enjoyed MARCO’S PENDULUM.  It’s funny and exciting and first-rate escapism.  It turns out there’s another one—MARCO AND THE BLADE OF NIGHT.  I found the first one on one of those mostly-bogus Kindle sale pushes and bought it immediately for Rickman’s name.  I’m now going to go look for the second one.  And Rickman, unlike some others I could name‡‡, is good at series.  Maybe he’ll write a third.

* * *

# I’ve asked poor Blogmom to make a separate list of all the book recs that have appeared as blog posts.  Since I’ve only just begun to put ‘book rec’ in the title, she is having some difficulty finding the old ones.  Here is the list so far:

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/book-recommendations/

If anyone remembers any others—including guest posts—would you please tell us?  Blogmom suggested I put a separate thread in the forum for Missing Book Recs, which I will do.

Thanks.

* Knitting magazines and homeopathy, yes.  Henry James and Donna Tartt, no.

** Official fantasy.  Not that Georgette Heyer isn’t fantasy.

*** And the worst thing about ebooks?  You can’t throw them across the room.

† Ah the disadvantages of fame.  Forty years ago you could fit the entire genre on a few shelves.  I should know, I did.  And supposing E R Eddison didn’t make you run screaming, it was all pretty good stuff.

†† And I’ve been meaning for the last six years to do a Merrily Watkins round-up book rec for the blog. I’m still meaning to.

††† Not as most of us know it anyway.  I don’t want to generalise.

‡ Pause for GNASHING OF TEETH AND HOWLING.  The bloody Kindle app has EATEN ALL MY BOOKMARKS.  I have no idea.  It appears to have selected two excerpts entirely on its own initiative and the ones I chose have disappeared.  So no witty excerpts and scintillating one-liners to intrigue you.  Apologies.  Arrrrgh.

‡‡ Cough cough cough cough cough