feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2007-08-25 03:45 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2007-08-25 03:45 pm
PERSONAL/REVIEW: Shopping experiences
I am currently using a library to access the internet, because I have what feels like a backlog of reviews - I've been reading a lot over August, enjoying the time that my holidays have afforded me to do so. Two days ago I shopped for more books (I was at a new town, so obviously I had to!). At a second-hand bookshop I'd wandered into the realm of the backroom, where the boxes lie in piles or full boxes. In some shops, this is the front room too.
So I picked up a book that had yet to be priced (Finding Minerva by Frances Thomas, which appealed because it's set in an alternate Britain, one in which the Romans never left). In the rare instances when this has happened to me before, the shopkeeper pulls a figure out of the air/their years of experience or say they aren't authorised to do that. This time, the bookseller opened up her laptop and checked the going rate at Amazon. I was amused, because this had never happened to me before and paid my £3. Well, I paid more than that, because I had got other books (including a May Wynne and a girls book that I think is older still).
What happened next isn't a first - sadly - and is a good example of Murphy's Law at work. It also wiped the grin off my face. I saw the same book - which I'd never seen before - was being sold at Oxfam for £1.99. I should, of course, have known better than to look at the price. Oh well, I got a bargain at Oxfam which sort of cancels it out (I can't be the only one whose brain works that way!?)
At about the same time, I was reading
Polly of Primrose Hill: Kathleen O'Farrell, Peal Press, no date, though it was written in Elizabeth II's reign.
The titular heroine of this fairy story cum mystery adventure is eleven. Given that so or thereabouts is its intended audience, it was a quick and easy read, with a fair amount of charm.
Orphaned Polly McBride, who lives in a somewhat instituionalised orphanage (though it made me think of a plainer boarding school) has imagination and a burgeoning desperate need to belong to people who belong to her. This has been spurred by a new favourite teacher (think Matilda's Miss Honey only less browbeaten) and a book about a cheerful large family that she constantly refers to.
On a rare outing to Primrose Hill, she comes across a figure who could have stepped out of the book, the awesomely named Professor Nathaniel Peabody. He reminds her so irresistably of the grumpy but loveable grandfather of her heart that Polly blurts out that she wants him to adopt her. And guess what? In as crochety a fashion as possible, he does. At Primrose Hill, Polly is within sniffing distance of a real family, for the Professor's invalid niece is charming and she makes a friend of her own age at the village, but there's also a housekeeper who seems to be a likeable person in everyone else's company, but another being entirely when it's just her and vulnerable orphan Polly.
You can tell that O'Farrell enjoys naming things - Polly meets the Tempests and the Gallows, and the names heighten the fairytale aspects. Peabody is an expert on roses and is thus known as the Rose King, Polly thinks of his niece Damaris as the Sleeping Beauty, and of course the heart of the story is how an orphaned girl gets adopted into a family of her own. The adventures with a gang of devious crooks don't quite hold together if you look too hard at the plot. In deference to her readers, the author holds back on the peril that Polly faces here, although in good old fairy tale style, she does suffer some nasty emotional cruelty, though the writer doesn't linger on it, before it all comes right in the end, in an appropriately 'romantic' way - to use one of the supporting characters' favourite word.
So I picked up a book that had yet to be priced (Finding Minerva by Frances Thomas, which appealed because it's set in an alternate Britain, one in which the Romans never left). In the rare instances when this has happened to me before, the shopkeeper pulls a figure out of the air/their years of experience or say they aren't authorised to do that. This time, the bookseller opened up her laptop and checked the going rate at Amazon. I was amused, because this had never happened to me before and paid my £3. Well, I paid more than that, because I had got other books (including a May Wynne and a girls book that I think is older still).
What happened next isn't a first - sadly - and is a good example of Murphy's Law at work. It also wiped the grin off my face. I saw the same book - which I'd never seen before - was being sold at Oxfam for £1.99. I should, of course, have known better than to look at the price. Oh well, I got a bargain at Oxfam which sort of cancels it out (I can't be the only one whose brain works that way!?)
At about the same time, I was reading
Polly of Primrose Hill: Kathleen O'Farrell, Peal Press, no date, though it was written in Elizabeth II's reign.
The titular heroine of this fairy story cum mystery adventure is eleven. Given that so or thereabouts is its intended audience, it was a quick and easy read, with a fair amount of charm.
Orphaned Polly McBride, who lives in a somewhat instituionalised orphanage (though it made me think of a plainer boarding school) has imagination and a burgeoning desperate need to belong to people who belong to her. This has been spurred by a new favourite teacher (think Matilda's Miss Honey only less browbeaten) and a book about a cheerful large family that she constantly refers to.
On a rare outing to Primrose Hill, she comes across a figure who could have stepped out of the book, the awesomely named Professor Nathaniel Peabody. He reminds her so irresistably of the grumpy but loveable grandfather of her heart that Polly blurts out that she wants him to adopt her. And guess what? In as crochety a fashion as possible, he does. At Primrose Hill, Polly is within sniffing distance of a real family, for the Professor's invalid niece is charming and she makes a friend of her own age at the village, but there's also a housekeeper who seems to be a likeable person in everyone else's company, but another being entirely when it's just her and vulnerable orphan Polly.
You can tell that O'Farrell enjoys naming things - Polly meets the Tempests and the Gallows, and the names heighten the fairytale aspects. Peabody is an expert on roses and is thus known as the Rose King, Polly thinks of his niece Damaris as the Sleeping Beauty, and of course the heart of the story is how an orphaned girl gets adopted into a family of her own. The adventures with a gang of devious crooks don't quite hold together if you look too hard at the plot. In deference to her readers, the author holds back on the peril that Polly faces here, although in good old fairy tale style, she does suffer some nasty emotional cruelty, though the writer doesn't linger on it, before it all comes right in the end, in an appropriately 'romantic' way - to use one of the supporting characters' favourite word.