Where Miss Percy Discovers Herself as Much as Anything

Miss Percy's Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons by Quenby Olson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fun and sweet book--a cozy fantasy, in fact, which is a useful term--and I found it a pleasant read. Although the stakes still seem pretty significant, comprising both Miss Percy's hopes for happiness and a little dragon's safety and survival, and there are dramatic moments, this isn't a bite-your-nails kind of story. It's got a whole different vibe that I think is underrepresented in fiction. Maybe I just haven't seen it...

Miss Percy is the unassuming, patient, and powerless sort of woman who seldom gets her own story, and she might have never got one, and might never have escaped her nearly-erased existence, except for the strange objects she received as inheritance from a relative that set things in motion. The most interesting object is--no spoiler--the rock every reader knows is more than a rock. Cataloguing the items with the help of the local clergyman gets her out of her controlling sister's house, which leads to both mystery and romance. Miss Percy begins to experience life in a way she had thought impossible. Her life had been only taking care of her sister's children while trying to take up as little space as possible. Watching her learn her own worth is much of the charm of the book.

Rather a quiet book, it's a quiet pleasure, and I recommend it for any reader who thinks that sounds like a good thing. I think it is.

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