That moment when you’re reading a book based in 1930’s London and enjoying the sly wit of the language until you come to a racist simile. (p. 48, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, (c) 1938)

Why that word as a descriptor instead of something else? And in such a throwaway manner? It came at me from left field and disrupted the flow of my reading.  I seriously re-read the sentence a couple times to make sure that I hadn’t read wrong.

Now I’m wary of what I’ll find in the rest of the book…