A Small Sidetrip.

I'm not sure how I came to possess the first and last books of series, but the fact that I do caused me to again patronize the Neill Public Library. The Drackenberg Adventure and The Jereda Adventure, by Lloyd Alexander. I've begun to strongly dislike the main character. She is very smart academically, and the author may have set her up as a kind of role model, but these books are from the mid 80s, which I will allow as an excuse. The main character is obnoxious, with an over-inflated opinion of herself; she makes poor decisions and doesn't know how to behave socially, but everything always works out all right for her, which rather makes it worse. Over the course of the series, she is 16 to 20, but acts more like she's 13 throughout. I'm not sure whether or not the author's use of invented locations for his books is good or bad. On the one hand, he may have had to use more imagination to create these places. On the other hand, which I find more likely, he picked aspects of surrounding countries that he liked, and rather have to deal with their histories to work in his own story, he just threw away the parts he didn't like and gave it a new name. There is frequent comma misuse.