Changes

The move is complete. For the most part, I've gotten myself settled in. Although I've only been here a week I've been feeling the stress. Its a big step, a big change and I've been feeling pressured. So I've learned rather quickly to never under estimate the power of a good cup of coffee and a phone call to a good friend. I've learned to pick up a good book or play an old childhood game. Things feel simple again. At least for a while.

I've finished Witch Child by Celia Rees. It was difficult to put down. However it came to me at a bad time. Between packing, cleaning, and moving I couldn't give it the full attention it deserved. Perhaps I'll read it again one of these days.

After seeing her beloved grandmother accused of witchcraft and tortured, teenager Mary Newbury is rescued from the same fate by a mysterious, wealthy woman who arranges for the young girl's passage to the English colony of Massachusetts. Accompanying a group of Puritans, Mary is befriended by a widow and tries to blend in among the settlers. After a long and difficult journey to New England, Mary finds that Old World witch hunts are alive in the New World. Fears of witches abound in seventeenth-century America, with strangers, particularly free-spirited, nature-loving women like Mary....Credit

Written in journal form you find yourself hanging on every last word. Celia Ress has written a sequel called Sorceress. I'll be looking into that book soon.

I'm currently reading The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker. Its a little difficult to get into, but its the first book in the series and it is a mystery novel. Its my expirience that mystery novels are incredably slow the first few chapters.

The Dragon Scroll is the first novel in the Akitada series.
Akitada is twenty-five years old, an impoverished nobleman and earnest
government official on his first major assignment. His whole future career
rides on this performance.
He has been sent to Kazusa province in Eastern
Japan to discover the whereabouts of missing taxes before the provincial
governor can leave his office and return to court. Eager and naïve about
political intrigues, Akitada blunders instantly into a dangerous conspiracy when
the suspicious death of the previous governor attracts his attention. This
signals a sequence of shocking and bloody violence in the provincial capital.
As two beautiful women play on his sympathies, Akitada is distracted from
a duty which becomes less and less palatable. In the end, both his
official and his private persona are tested.

Among the characters,
new readers will meet two regulars, the elderly family servant, Seimei, and the
impudent womanizer Tora. The meeting between Akitada and Tora in this
novel begins the strong bond between master and servant that characterizes the
later novels.

The other characters represent a cross section of
Japanese society in the eleventh century; they include noblemen-scholars,
Buddhist clerics, minor officials in the provincial administration, soldiers,
artisans, wrestlers, peddlers, prostitutes, gangs, and one very unusual young
woman who matches her fighting skills against any man.

From the
exciting beginning of his journey to the nightmarish climax at the end,
Akitada’s adventure in Kazusa is a fast-paced and riveting account of a young
man’s passage to maturity. Website

So, Despite the challenge of the first few chapters I'm going to give it a shot. I love Japanese culture and I do enjoy mysteries. I'm rather excited about this book. Here's to hoping!