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The Chatham School Affair, Thomas H. Cook

Meh.

Everyone kept comparing other books to The Chatham School Affair with favorable-sounding opinions, so I picked it up at the library a little while ago and started reading it, and I have to confess that I found it somewhat trying.  I couldn’t get into the story because of all the frantic foreshadowing.  It kept being all Little did we know when first we beheld that peaceful landscape how much BLOOD AND DEATH AND MISERY there would be there later on, and I only read a little bit of it, but I just got fed up with the way Mr. Cook was caking on the foreshadowing.  Like those cakes with that vanilla frosting where normal people have to scrape off the flowers and leaves but some people love it so much that they demand to have the pieces with flowers and leaves on top and even accept your discarded frosting flowers and leaves.  I am scraper-offer, and this foreshadowing was way the hell too much.

(I am apparently really really into dessert similes.  I am now putting a one-month embargo on dessert similes.  Or metaphors.)

Maybe sometime I’ll try to read this again.  Maybe not.  We’ll see.