I came across Delia Marshall Turner’s Dog of the Dead backwards: I saw a link to the short story "Stubborn stains", which is truly lovely, and thought that the novel was a sequel to it.
It turns out that the short story is actually the sequel, not the other way around. However, they both stand alone fine, so that lack of knowledge did not affect my reading experience.
What did affect my reading experience, however, is a piece of information that is literally in the book blurb but that I did not figure out until quite some way into the book. I don’t know which way I would have preferred to learn it, so I’ll let you decide. Here’s the blurb:
Middle school English teacher Martha Whitaker has finally made it to winter break, and she is not going to let anything keep her from completing her vacation chores: Not the appearance of an immense egg on her kitchen table, not her nosy neighbor Mr. Miklos, and not a crowd of former students popping up out of nowhere to ask her help.
Click here to uncollapse/collapse the spoilery part
She will certainly not allow the armies of the recently dead (or her own unexpected demise) to deter her from painting her living room and the upstairs bedroom.
Ms. Whitaker is used to staring danger in the face, calling it by its full name, and asking it if it has done its homework, and with her small army (or on her own, if necessary, because one person always ends up doing all the group work), she will […] do what needs to be done.
But either way, I did find the book ultimately difficult because the protagonist sticks so adamantly to her own goals and perspective, not listening to other people or seeking to understand what their motivations are. It is both admirable and deeply frustrating, and I don’t think the hidden bit of the blurb would have made it any better. The tight focus also means that I’m hazy on the motivations behind a significant chunk of the plot.
Basically this is a great concept, I’m glad I read it, but I did not feel in sync with it. I do recommend the short story, however, and I look forward to reading the next one.
She also has a 1990s secondary world fantasy trilogy, The Ways of Magic, which starts with Nameless Magery; anyone have thoughts on whether I’m likely to find it more congenial?