A meh book but an interesting author story with this one, you can see its cover in the picture from my charity shop finds in Penzance here, and you’ll get the review of the Ada Leverson up next, too. So the author is Nancy Moss, and I remember a discussion on here or Facebook about her (or “her”) so I did a quick search and found this information page on Goodreads which details that a) the first two books in the Cliff House series were republished with ROBERTA Moss as the author, and they were all actually written by a chap called Robert Alfred Moss, who apparently wrote Girl Guide and Brownie books. All very odd. The only Brownie books I remember reading were Verily Anderson’s ones. I’d love to know if any of my blog readers have read any of those!

Nancy Moss – “The Riddle of Cliff House”

(03 October 2016)

Published in 1957, this school story is almost a parody of itself, with all the familiar tropes and characters of a classic girls’ school story piled one on top of the other in a breathless rush, with most of the characters being pretty annoying. Ends are then left untied, even though this is the last in the series and characters actually mention at the end of the book how annoying it is that the ends haven’t been tied up like they would in a school story! I normally like a bit of metafiction here and there, but the central character with her endless punning is SO annoying … disappointing and not much to redeem it. I was going to write this in the style of the book, but realised I was annoying myself!

Just a couple of NetGalley “wins” so that’s OK, isn’t it. I have Michael Currinder’s “Running Full Tilt” which is about a promising cross-country runner’s relationship with his somewhat violent autistic brother (I’m worried about the violence anyway and the link of violence with autism but it’s had some praise and I’ll have to see). Then I just won Sandhya Menon’s “When Dimple Met Rishi” – and is a light Indian-American romance novel set at a coding convention, just the thing for some light reading, and the kind of thing I like to dip into sometimes. I don’t think the reading / reviewing load will be too heavy on those and I don’t have any weird restrictions on when I can post the reviews, either.

So, tell me if you’ve read Robert Moss’s Brownie books, or what you’re reading now. And I promise I’ll catch up with everyone’s blogs over the weekend. I’ve been working on a Very Exciting Project which I can’t talk about, so reading working running … that was it for this week really!