Paul Park, The Hidden World

Final entry in the series that began with A Princess of Roumania. Can Miranda Popescu make up for her earlier blenders and save Great Roumania as her dead aunt wants? Should she even try, or does the aunt have her own selfish agenda?

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This has definitely been one of the weirder and less conventional fantasy epics I've read in the last few years -- rather bleak in tone, and seriously short on eucatastrophe, but with enough distinctive and interesting -- if not entirely admirable -- characters to keep my interest. Having the world we know turn out to be basically a construct designed for the heroine's protection and education -- though it turns out not to be quite that simple, in the end -- is a risky move, tough on the suspension of disbelief, but the author more or less pulls it off.

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We spotted a couple of black squirrels on the Stanford campus this lunchtime -- attractive little things; it's funny how the black fur trips the "Ooh, kitty!" circuits. A bit of googling suggests that they are either a separate species called fox squirrels or (maybe less likely) a melanistic version of the common gray squirrel which some web-authorities claim doesn't exist in California. They acted very like regular squirrels, of the people-habituated urban variety; they skittered off up a tree when we approached, but not with any great urgency, and we got the feeling that they might not have been averse to an offer of peanuts or apple-cores.

We also spent a few minutes quietly viewing the inside of the Memorial Church. It's as gaudy on the inside, with lots of gilding and technicolor stained glass, as it is on the outside; I've never seen anything like it, though admittedly my experience with the inside of mainstream churches is not wide, being mostly confined to the rather faded, time-worn interiors of historic British cathedrals, which lost most of their more opulent decoration in the Reformation.