fidzu : debian

Review: Midlife in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Midlife in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel. It's urban fantasy in the sense that it's set in our world but with magic that most people don't know about, but the primary setting is a parish in rural Scotland and therefore the genre is not urban in that sense. It was Linzi Day's published first novel.

As the story opens, Niki McKnight is a widow in Manchester, England with a job in the Register Office she likes, a boss she hates, and a Bichon Frise dog she adores. In the year since her husband Nick died, she's put her life on hold and made as few decisions as possible, despite some concerned pushing from her best friend Aysha. The death of her grandmother is not entirely unexpected, but her inheritance is about to upend her life.

Niki assumes that her grandmother has a modest cottage and a small estate, and therefore being the named heir will mostly involve cleaning up the details of a modest life. She is caught by surprise by a requirement in the will that she live in Gretna Green for a year and a day in order to inherit. Her initial reaction is to treat this as an absurd impossibility given her life and job in Manchester, but she slowly realizes something strange is going on. Her grandmother's lawyer is lying to her, he refuses to tell her the value of the estate and seems to think it's more valuable than she expected, and her grandmother's tiny cottage does not seem to be following the seasons of the rest of the world. There is something magical at work.

I will not spoil the rest of the reveal. I will say that this is a magical house book because, if you are anything like me, that is why you will want to read this series. There are not enough magical house books, and this is one of the better kind that allow the house to be a full speaking character.

Midlife in Gretna Green is an unapologetic fantasy of personal agency. Niki starts the novel with a miserable manager, a messy pile of unread mail she doesn't want to deal with, and a lot of personal emotional baggage. She gets handed a position that requires and rewards standing up for herself and being decisive. It comes with a pile of unresolved but not horribly complex problems that were waiting for someone who would listen, make sensible decisions, and treat other people with respect. Oh, and there are a few assholes in the way, but they seriously underestimate the power she has to put a stop to their bullshit.

This is the sort of book that traditional publishers tended not to buy (although Day apparently did get an offer for this one and turned it down), and I'm not sure why. Editors thought protagonists should have to work harder for their payoff? Some lingering Calvinist dourness in English language publishing mistrusted triumphant books? Obvious wish fulfillment was considered embarrassing or low-class and thus didn't warrant publication? This didn't apply to the endless bildungsromans about magically talented boys, so some level of sexism was probably in play. Maybe this is finally changing? It reminds me of the bias against romance novels and their guaranteed happily ever after, and in the case of romance there was too much money for publishers to leave it on the table.

In any case, the growth of self-publishing has created an alternative market that let these books reach an audience and I for one am here for it. A lot of wish-fulfillment books, and a lot of self-published books, are not very good, but the ones that have a spark of originality and character can be a delight worth tolerating the somewhat rocky editing and pacing problems that a full editorial staff might have cleaned up.

I loved reading books about kickass women who took no crap and fixed their lives up exactly how they wanted them to be. But how did they get to be that way? They always started out awesome in the books. Seriously, did they kick ass at sixteen? Or did their superpower kickassery not kick in until they were thirty? Forty? If so, then I was screwed. Would I need to wait till I was fifty or until a genie arrived offering wishes? I already felt as if I'd spent my whole life waiting for something wild and wonderful to happen.

Niki is a Specific Type to a somewhat hilarious degree, and I'm not sure if Day is playing into that intentionally or if she's projecting herself into the book. The amount of self-insertion is not zero: Day also lives in Gretna Green, owns a Bichon Frise, and worked as an assistant registrar and civil celebrant. Niki also drinks wine regularly, has a psychic gift, occasionally reads tarot cards, is an accommodating pushover at work who struggles to say no to her abusive boss, has impostor syndrome problems, and swears by a fictional self-help book about grief that provides the quotes at the starts of chapters. There is a cat, because of course there's a cat.

(The fictional self-help book is a spot-on parody played entirely straight in the story. I think Day is having some fun with the reader? I can't tell!)

This is what I mean by unapologetic. It's easy to read Niki as a stereotype, but she's a stereotype a lot of real people can identify with and there's something highly satisfying in watching her find her footing. I like wish fulfillment books; it's fun to see someone's wishes come true! Particularly in the year of 2026, there's something immensely satisfying in seeing an ordinary, insecure person get a massive amount of power and use it to make the world better. I don't need everything to be hard, fraught, and laden with costs in fiction, although I wouldn't want every book I read to be like this.

Also, the world building is great. It's not polished; there's a bit of a grab bag feeling to it, I'm dubious the magic system has any underlying rigorous rule set, and Niki's powers, once she has access to them, are more of a semi-sentient genie than a skill she has to learn with hard practice. But the magic is fun. The sentient house is one of the best characters, particularly after Niki realizes how underused it has been, and I am a sucker for any good sentient house book. The cat is a far more interesting character than I first thought she would be. And Niki's new magical job is more complicated and less typical than the normal Celtic-inspired fantasy that I thought it was going to be at first.

My primary warning about this book is that Niki starts out beaten down and grieving her dead husband, and it took me about five pages to decide that her dead husband was a complete piece of shit who was not worth any of the grief Niki puts into him. She also doesn't stand up for herself for the first hundred pages or so, which made me want to yell at the book a few times. Both of these problems go away farther into the book, and Niki does eventually figure out that Nick was abusive trash, but I was relieved when the "make endless excuses for worthless men" portion of the story was finally over. You have to stick with it until Niki gets brave enough to try being the protagonist; once that happens, it becomes great fun.

It is fairly obvious that Midlife in Gretna Green was self-published, and I wish it had gotten the editing that it deserved. My copy had a couple of obvious formatting errors, the plot veers about more than was strictly necessary, and I think a careful editing pass could have tightened the writing by about fifty pages or so without losing any important detail. If that sort of thing bothers you, make sure you're in self-published fiction mode before starting this one. But it also has that irrepressible, bubbling-with-ideas feeling of a book where nothing has suppressed the author's enthusiasm. It's a very grabby book; once Niki starts embracing her new life, I could barely put it down.

If you're in the mood for a good fantasy wish-fulfillment story that has no romance and a whole lot of "why are things run this way, no, we're changing that," highly recommended. I had so much fun with this book, and the series is currently making the rounds of my whole family. Don't read this when you're looking for something challenging and literary and deep; save it for when you desperately want to watch someone just fix something for once, damn it.

Followed by Painting the Blues in Gretna Green, which I have already read, breaking my usual rule of writing reviews before reading the next book in a series.

Rating: 8 out of 10

29 Jul 2026 2:19am GMT

RcppDate ships the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant to enable use from R packages. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11, C++14 and C++17 what is (with minor modifications) the 'date' library in C++20. The RcppDate package adds no extra R or C++ code and can therefore be a zero-cost dependency for any other project; yet a number of other projects decided to re-vendor it resulting in less-efficient duplication. Oh well. C'est la vie.

This release syncs with upstream release 3.0.5 made yesterday. We also made two routine updates to the continuous integration since the last release a good year ago. The Debian and r2u packages for this new release have already been uploaded too.

Changes in version 0.0.7 (2026-07-27)

• Updated to upstream version 3.0.5

• Regular updates to continuous integration setup

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

28 Jul 2026 1:32pm GMT

Welcome to post 57 in the R⁴ series.

R packages with compiled codes can use the file src/Makevars to set compilation flags. We often rely on this to set libraries, include directories or compilation options. When using external libraries, be it header-only or via headers and linking, we are often experiencing 'compilation noise' when these libraries tickle warnings under generally-recommended flags such as -Wall -pedantic. Two packages I maintain are clearly repeat offenders here: Eigen, and BH. Both cam generate pages and pages of compiler output. This is generally not great as it may hide genuine warnings from our own code.

What makes matters worse is that some of the available and specific options for the compilers are treated by R CMD check as 'non-portable' leading to a nag on package checking. Examples are -Wno-parentheses, -Wno-maybe-uninitialize or -Wno-nunnull.

I have long resorted to adding these to my per-user ~/.R/Makevars. When added there, compilation is quieter, but R CMD check still nags here where the option is set but not at CRAN or r-universe. A situation that is not ideal but what somewhat 'stable'.

More recently, I realized there was an available check we can use to conditionally add extra compilation flags but leave them off by default. That makes local development quiet allowing us to focus on the quality of our additions here without noise from third-party libraries we may use. At the same time we do not need to do anything else to let CRAN do its work.

The check we now use is whether there is a .git/ directory present. If so, we are indeed building from local sources and can add extra flags. If not, we are likely building from a tar.gz source archive-which is the case for CRAN-and hence do not set these.

An example use is this recent additional to package qlcal where this bit of R code is invoked from a minimal shell script configure and replaces the stub @XTRAFLAGS@ in src/Makevars.in (or src/Makevars.win.in)

if (dir.exists(".git")) {
    ## development from a .git directory can use these flags
    xtraflags <- "-Wno-nonnull -Wno-deprecated-declarations"
} else {
    ## else build from tarball so stick with existing flags
    xtraflags <- ""
}
win <- if (Sys.info()[["sysname"]] == "Windows") ".win" else ""
infile <- file.path("src", paste0("Makevars", win, ".in"))
outfile <- file.path("src", paste0("Makevars", win))
lines <- readLines(infile)
lines <- gsub("@XTRAFLAGS@", xtraflags, lines)
writeLines(lines, outfile)

With this change, local compilation is quiet, yet CRAN has nothing to nag about (as seen at the qlcal results page).

Similarly, one can also check from an actual configure file written in autoconf. Here is a similar example from RcppEigen (showing some relevants parts of the whole file)

# PKG_CXXFLAGS initialized earlier ...

## Check if building locally
AC_MSG_CHECKING([whether .git/ exists])
if test -d "$srcdir/.git"; then
    AC_MSG_RESULT([yes, adding extra flags])
    AC_SUBST([PKG_CXXFLAGS],["${PKG_CXXFLAGS} -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-maybe-uninitialized"])
else
    AC_MSG_RESULT([no, consider adding '-Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-maybe-uninitialized' to ~/.R/Makevars])
fi

AC_SUBST([PKG_CXXFLAGS], ["${PKG_CXXFLAGS}"])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([src/Makevars])
AC_OUTPUT

Once again, with this change compilation is quiet locally, yet unaffected at CRAN. Just what we want. Give it a try in your packages.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

27 Jul 2026 10:40pm GMT