Outside Inn, by Ethel M. Kelley, is alternately fun and vaguely off-putting, and while the plots had almost nothing in common it ended up reminding me quite a bit of Cinderella Jane. And half a dozen other things, in bits. Possibly because there are half a dozen premises shoehorned in, each of them perfectly nice by itself, but slightly less nice when squashed in with all the others.
So, Nancy Martin’s family is mostly dead but she’s got a group of close friends, and she’s about to open a restaurant. She’s studied every aspect of the food service business and she’s full of schemes for feeding good, nourishing, portion-controlled food to the masses at low prices. Her restaurant is a sort of philanthropic project and operates at a large deficit, and people end up using the word “eleemosynary” quite a bit, which annoys me. Read the rest of this entry ?
Redeeming Qualities 