PERSONAL/OVERVIEW/TENNIS
Nov. 11th, 2007 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllYesterday, I told myself that I really needed to cool down on the book-buying front, as I have piles of unread titles to go through. I came home with four purchased books and one borrowed book. Oops. One of them was a children’s book, two of them were books I already have copies of – one of those purchases were intentional, I wanted a better copy of an Austen, in the other case, I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d bought a copy or not, and 65p was worth the risk.
Over the weekend, I read the last of the ‘Hay haul’, a book I bought in April:
The Saturday Club: Elizabeth Leitch. Blackie.
This is going to be an overview, not a full-blown review.
This story wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. Nine year old Sharley (Charlotte) starts going to St Dorothea, where Anna is already a pupil. Anna is the youngest of several girls, a little square, but not entirely, while more impulsvie Sharley is the middle child between two brothers and an artist’s daughter. They form a fast friendship; make up a club; have quirky adventures - in which Sharley makes most suggestions and Anna stands the bill. One of those adventures introduces them to Marigold, an orphan who can do circus tricks and who is a threat to Anna and Sharley’s chumminess, except the moral of the book is to share and that niceness is appreciated.
This is aimed at a pretty young readership, the style is therefore simplistic, and although there’s a little nod to an older point of view (Anna’s conventional and respectable mother, the Howard’s cook – again, Sharley’s lack of pocket money seems like a genteel poverty from this distance) I wasn’t really engaged.
Although the two main characters’ names did make me think of Anne Shirley (and Anne and Diana).
Meanwhile, what on earth is going on in tennis?
Over the weekend, I read the last of the ‘Hay haul’, a book I bought in April:
The Saturday Club: Elizabeth Leitch. Blackie.
This is going to be an overview, not a full-blown review.
This story wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. Nine year old Sharley (Charlotte) starts going to St Dorothea, where Anna is already a pupil. Anna is the youngest of several girls, a little square, but not entirely, while more impulsvie Sharley is the middle child between two brothers and an artist’s daughter. They form a fast friendship; make up a club; have quirky adventures - in which Sharley makes most suggestions and Anna stands the bill. One of those adventures introduces them to Marigold, an orphan who can do circus tricks and who is a threat to Anna and Sharley’s chumminess, except the moral of the book is to share and that niceness is appreciated.
This is aimed at a pretty young readership, the style is therefore simplistic, and although there’s a little nod to an older point of view (Anna’s conventional and respectable mother, the Howard’s cook – again, Sharley’s lack of pocket money seems like a genteel poverty from this distance) I wasn’t really engaged.
Although the two main characters’ names did make me think of Anne Shirley (and Anne and Diana).
Meanwhile, what on earth is going on in tennis?
