Mrs. Tim of the Regiment 1

• 
  The author D. E. Stevenson wrote this in 1934 to tell the daughter of a friend what it was like to be married to an officer in a Highland Regiment. However, the version I read was copyrighted in 1940 by Farrar & Rinehart. This shows the condition of Hester Christie, one not at the top of the social heap, in the form of a daily journal for six months. She has two children Betty and Bryan, two servants and a cook, a husband who is concerned with his possibilities of advancement, and her husband's superior, Major Morley, who might be hiding a romantic interest in her, but she (and we) can really tell. Hestor is concerned with others, smiling and pleasant, and wins a cheer at a children's party when they appreciate that she is going away with her husband to western Scotland for several years.
• Hester and Tim rub shoulders with the upper class at a point-to-point riding contest where Tim is brought to win honors for the regiment, and later when she goes for a month to northern Scotland with her neighbor, to be squired by her neighbor's innocent son Guthrie (a naval officer) and Major Morley. Luxury gives her time, and the social constraints give her a set of theaters to manage others, such as rescuing Guthrie from an unsuitably shallow wife.
• I kept thinking of the role of court, in which the king is treated as a baby. The upper classes are given total support, so that the men may go forth and fight, and the women may manage their estates and raise their children. The benefits and responsibility are both great. Those of lower classes, as Hester deals with them in suitable ways, give alliegance and support to them.
• As with the other D. E. Stevenson book, there are occasionally places of skillful discription, especially of the wild places in the Scottish Highlands. An occasional ghost is seen, placidly, and taken in stride, for they are a part of the weight of their surroundings. I doubt that I would sense these places so deaply.

The Changeling Sea 1

SPOILER ALERT! The items discussed here are familiar books that are being re-read for travel. As such, no effort is made to shield the reader from the results of plot development.

• The book was written by Patricia A. McKillup and published by Del Rey in 1988. It deals with a girl Periwinkle (Peri for short) who hexes the Sea because it has taken her father and her mother's attention. This releases a sea dragon (the size of a blue whale), who is confined by an enormous golden chain. The magician Lyo turns the chain to periwinkles, to the horror and anger of the fishermen, who have been dreaming of GOLD, and the dragon begins turning to human shape at nights, and learning to speak. At the same time, Peri meets Kir, the son of the king, who wants the enter the sea the way her mother does, and can not even fall in love with her, for he loves the sea more.
• It turns out that the king loved a Lady of the sea, and then married a lady on land. The two ladies gave birth at the same time, the land lady died, and the children were exchanged. Now, the children want to change back, and Peri and Lyo and the king meet the Lady, who gives back the hexes transformed, and says that she is willing to exchange the children (young men) and Kir agrees to call for Peri when she is an old woman, to invite her to enter the sea.
• This view of sea people contrasts sharply with the view in The Riddle Master of Hed, where the people of the sea take human form and act as assassins, without ever explaining why they are so vicious. The initial view of the sea was hateful, but the differences were mediated.
• Magic is never explained, but the unthinking hexes of Peri were very effective because she had "power".