Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith

The seventh book in the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series seems to be a bit of a departure from the rest. There’s a blackmail plot, a snake in the office, an advice columnist who doesn’t seem to give advice so much as make vague comments, a snake in the office, a wounded bird (literally, not metaphorically) and a pair of blue shoes that are very pretty, but may be a bit too small.

There’s also Mma Ramotswe considering *gasp* a diet, despite her belief that she is the exact shape Botswanan women are traditionally meant to be, and Mma Makutsi learns the hard way the misconceptions people have regarding feminism.  It’s charming, like all the books in the series, but struck an off-kilter note for me, I think because there was an emphasis on people pondering changing not because of a flaw they have or because of something that needs to be changed or improved, or because of growth as a person, but because would conform to the expectations of others.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

Reason is a nomadic teenager who has lived all over Australia with her mother, with 4 months being the longest they ever stayed in one place. Her mother, always a bit off-kilter, has raised Reason to believe that her grandmother, Esmeralda, is an evil witch, and to reject anything that could so much as hint at magic, real or fictional. But now Reason’s mother has been institutionalized, and Reason is sent to live with Esmeralda. Her plans to runaway result in her meeting Tom, a neighbor whose mother is in the same institution as Reason’s, and who claims Esmeralda is his teacher, and Jay-Tee, a New York teen who takes Reason under her wing when Reason accidentally ends up in New York.

The book is told in first person for Reason’s chapters, and third person for Tom and Jay-Tee, and I particularly like how Reason and Tom’s chapters have Australian slang and spelling, but Jay-Tee’s have American slang and spelling. I like most of Larbalestier’s system of magic and how it’s different for each person and has consequences (though I’m not really comfortable with the consequences of denying magic) and with how it manifests for each person seems to be tied into their personalities (Jay-Tee is talky and a people-person, Reason is a math genius and can do Fibonacci sequences intuitively, and frequently does them as something of a comfort zone, and Tom is very design-minded). I also like how Jay-Tee, never having seen an Aborigine or a half-Aborigine\half-white person before, immediately assumes that Reason is Hispanic, because it’s the ethnicity she knows that Reason most resembles, and because she’s Hispanic herself. It felt very realistic.

And you know, looking at the cover, which is a shadowy back-view of a young woman (most likely Reason, possibly Jay-Tee) floating just above a snowy New York street, I kind of adore it visually, but wish I had seen it before the recent cover controversy regarding Larbalestier’s Liar, and before I would have realized that the cover design was probably to avoid putting a non-white lead on the cover of a YA fantasy.