OVERVIEW: Christmas reading

[feather_ghyll]

Over the holidays, I made the most of the opportunity to just sit down and read books from cover to cover. I started off with The Big Six by Arthur Ransome, which I really don't think I'd read before. I barely remembered Coot Club, which would have been a help, as it features the same characters and location. So, at first, I was indifferent to the Death and Glories in and Tom, and I never did really differentiate between Joe and Bill. Pete only stands out because he's the youngest. Their dialect annoyed me to, so it was a relief when the D's turned up.

Actually, that's somewhat harsh, as things picked up from the pike fishing onwards. The story is that the three Death and Glories, who have just fixed up their boat so that they can sleep on it, are wrongfully assumed to be responsible for casting off other boats. As their friends and fellow members of the Coot Club, Tom, Dot and Dick (but mainly Dot) decide to become detectives and prove their innocence, and Ransome shows lesser writers how to do that plot.

But the Admiral (the Ds' host) is woefully sexist at one point, insisting that, as a girl, Dot stays at form when the less sensible (on balance) Dick gets to stay up late doing dangerous detecting work with the other boys!!! Dot should have done what Nancy would have done and sneaked out.

I worked my way through The Woman in White - I believe I called every character a ninny at some junction.

I should have said the same thing about Family Playbill by Pamela Brown, but I was aware that if I had read the book when I was younger, I'd have loved to the acting Cinderella story. Lexy (Alexandra) is the middle child and family drudge, as the only sensible Mannering. Her parents run a touring company, and are doing their best to turn Cicely, their eldest into a leading lady. But they sent her away to a school fer leydees (this is set during the Victoria era, although it took me most of the first chapter to realise this). When she eloped, the company has no Juliet...until 13-year-old Lexy, making use of all the adventures and events of the past few chapters, steps into the breach.

I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which was recommended by callmemadam among others.

And then I read a Bessie Marchant, A Girl of the Northland, again featuring a sensible girl supporting a family of dreamers, but this is Marchant territory, so Brown's fevers and fires are the sorts of things that happen in one chapter alone. This is a book for older girls, because our heroine, Olive, is a teacher at the beginning of the book, and ends it engaged. The families in financial straits, because her father disappeared, searching for gold. Everyone else is hung up on gentility, but Olive is horrified to discover that they're in huge debts, and sets about taking up menial work when their settlement becomes a boon town because copper has been found there. (However, it is silver that saves the day!)

The latter was an interesting precursor to reading A Cousin from Canada by May Wynne, in which Helen, Geoffrey and 'darling' tomboy Rosebell (I repeat, Rosebell), whose mother is in Switzerland recieving treatment, and their doctor father take in a distant cousin, Jack. Jack was latterly brought up at a miners' camp in Canada, and the three children are essentially charged to tame him.

The main thing that Jack brings (apart from a successful claim to a mine at the end of the book) is Red Indian games. Geoff and Rosebell throw themselves into them enthusiastically, although 'tomboy' Rosebell ends up taking the domestic responsibilities on. This was an 'improving' book, with your the author breaking into the story to tell us about how consciences were troubling the characters and so forth. Typically, their happily ever after is a move to Devonshire, where the absent mother can return to without having to worry about her health.