Happy Friday everyone, and also happy New Meg Langslow week. Book 38 (!), Five Golden Wings, is out this week and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about why the Meg Christmas books are among my favourite festive themed novels – and in fact are some of the few festive related titles that I actively look forward to.
If you’ve missed my previous appreciations of the series, Meg Langslow is a blacksmith and town organiser in a small town in Virginia called Caerphilly. She has a retired-actor-turned-professor husband and a set of twins and an enormous and eccentric extended family. The series exists in what I call the Floating Now, where time does pass, but not at the same rate as it has passed in real life, but modern developments are incorporated as if there were there all along. See also Charles Paris who has been in his early 50s since the 1970s and is still in them now except that his bedsit is now a studio apartment and he has a smartphone tear her than an answer machine.
Donna Andrews is continuing to write two a year, and after 25 years they’re still great. And don’t get me wrong, I love the non-Christmas ones, but in a world where every year there are more Christmas themed books, be it murder mystery or romance, hers are a cut above. Whether it’s her family descending on her for the season, a storm, or another Caerphilly festive event, Andrews keeps managing to thing of festive scenarios to put the characters in for Meg to stumble across a corpse.
I try my hardest to save them and savour them, but it is hard. The good news is that compared to when I first started to buy them, they’re much easier to get hold of now because they’re on Kindle in the UK, which they weren’t back in 2013 when I first read Murder with Peacocks.
Anyway, my first festive read is still a few weeks away because I do try and get past Halloween before I start on them, but if you’re in the market for some tinsel already, then you could do a lot worse!
Have a great weekend!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 