minutia_r

I've been reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and I've been enjoying it so far, despite the author's strange quirk of referring to her protagonist as "he" even when he isn't the male character most recently mentioned. She occasionally lapses into second person; maybe she wrote the whole thing in second person and did a search-and-replace?

Anyway, the following passage had me grinning, so I wanted to share it with the rest of you:

It is time to bring the girls into the family business. Johane complains of her daughter's poor sewing, and it seems that, transferring the needle surreptitiously into her wrong hand, the child has devised an awkward little backstitch which you would be hard-pushed to imitate. She gets the job of sewing up his dispatches for the north.