Took A Bit: THE BORROWED HILLS by Scott Preston

 THE BORROWED HILLS by Scott Preston, 2024, 9781668050675.

Guy grows up with an incredibly emotionally distant father in the sheep and hill country of Cumbria. His mother up and leaves when he is a child. Guy leaves home to drive long-haul trucks. Gets called back when father is ill and ends up helping his father and a neighbor with destroying all the stock when Foot-and-Mouth outbreak. The work rounding up, killing the sheep, and burning the corpses. 

The Foot-Mouth experience is awful. The work is 24 hours a day and walking through the smoke and soot of burning sheep corpses. Guy finishes that help, gets fed up with father, leaves a couple more years, returns when father dies.

Guy takes on "work" with Neighbor. No pay to speak of. Guy just works and lives on the farm. His life is work, visits to the pub, and poorly hidden infatuation with Neighbor's Wife that Guy knew in school. 

Neighbor joins with a regional crook on a theft of sheep from down South. Things just get worse and worse from there.

Comments:

1. No. Names are not needed. I barely noticed them, really. Just a way to tell the difference among the two primaries and three others.

2. Probably a ton of symbolism and literary methods I never recognized or parsed.

3. Not sure I'd recommend this or not.

BBC: THE MIGHTY ONION by Mark Crilley

THE MIGHTY ONION by Mark Crilley, 2024, 9780316490313.

Read in 2025. I'm way behind on entries.

I follow Crilley on Facebook after really enjoying the AKIKO comic book novels. Crilley was also doing some really neat instructional instructional videos on drawing. 

I read one post in July, 2025 he shared about this comic novel and HOLY SHIT! RADCLIFFE AND MACONIE?!

Yeah. I was very surprised he named two characters after one of my absolute favorite BBC 6 Music shows. 

I've been listening to The Radcliffe and Maconie Show for years, so I couldn't resist sneaking in a little shoutout to them in my MIGHTY ONION series. If you live in the UK, you really ought to tune in to their radio show-- it's delightful!

Anyhoo. Middle reader comic novel about a kid, Elliott, who is convinced he has a sure fire hit idea for a comic book hero. Except he cannot draw worth a damn. He looks for a classmate to be his artist and finds Pamela who has plenty of talent.

Story unfolds where the comic is a hit at school, even the teachers enjoy it. But, Elliott wants total control and clashes with Pamela's artistic renderings. Things happen. The partnership fractures until Elliott realizes he was in the wrong. Partnership unifies and returns to super heroeing.

Fun story with epistolary episodes of back-and-forth notes between the two. Also drawn by the two different characters with rough sketchwork of Elliott and skilled art of Pamela.