Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson

This book is a story of three women who go to the East on a missionary trip to the Silk Road city of Kashgar in 1923.  One of the women, Evangeline, brings her green bicycle along and has plans to write a guidebook for women riding their bikes in the East. Meanwhile, there is a parallel story set in modern London.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading a Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar and trying to figure out how the two separate story lines were going to converge. Suzanne Joinson's research was amazing and she did a great job of evoking the sounds, smell, and feel of Kashgar. I thought the modern sections were also well done, but found myself wanting to know more about the life of Evangeline and Irene Guy when they returned to England and why she had the owl as a pet.

Ginormous paintings

I finished the 19th Wife and I wasn't as happy with it as I thought I would be. It started out well switching between a modern day mystery told by a "lost boy" who was kicked out of his polygamous sect where he was born and Ann Eliza Young, one of the wives of Brigham Young, but I had some problems with it. I found it irritating to basically read Ann Eliza's book in a new form, where the author changed some of the events, took out the Victorian language, etc. I would have preferred to have just read the original if that is what I wanted to do.

Other than that one major problem, I thought the book was well written, but the modern day mystery was awfully light and not hard to figure out.

My current read is the Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein. I have read 2/3 of it and just love it. It is a historical novel based on the life of Chinese painter Pan Yuliang.

I keep working on my painting every day, but I still have so much to do. The lion has a disco suit and boots with dog's heads on them. My fox is my favorite part. Here are the pictures I took just the other day. The sun was out, so I was going to just paint in one little thing and take pictures and it got cloudy before I could get outside, so I had to use the flash. Maybe this weekend I can get some better ones.