feather_ghyll

The Sherwood Ring: Elizabeth Marie Pope. Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprint.

This is an unusual book, with ( Read more... )

The Head Girl’s Deputy: Brenda Page. 1930, Cassell

This book features a lot of the elements you’d expect or hope to find in a girls boarding school story, even a new girl whose ideas of school life have been influenced by reading school stories, although that isn’t a strong strand. Up to the end, ( Read more... )

The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy: Judith L. Pearson. The Lyons Press, 2005.

This is the biography of Virginia Hall, an-American-born spy who worked for the British and later the Americans as an intelligence officer in France during World War 2. Her story is remarkable and ( Read more... )

The bookshelves arrived safely - if a little later than I'd expected and rather needed them so be. It fits in where it was meant to - I was paranoid about my measurement-taking skills, and had been matched to the same colour as other bedroom furniture, so it looks nice. My Ns to Rs (Girls Own) more or less fit in to it with random books on the top. This led to a sorting that meant that I emptied one big box and one small box. I still have boxes of books in plain view, but in my denial, I'm holding on to the fact that I have found some doublers and old Enid Blytons to go to the charity shop like it's a giant leap forward.

And now some tennis (Wawrinka's backhand was a thing of beauty yesterday).

I got a chance to go into a proper, if tiny, second-hand bookshop over the weekend. I don’t recall whether I’ve written about thi particular shop before here or not. It’s the sort of shop where you have to be willing to devote time to searching and even literally kneel down if you’re a children’s book collector or, er, a bookish child. I had a bit of a misanthropic spell there. I’d like to say it was idiot holiday-makers who clearly only went into bookshops when they came across them unexpectedly out of the daily run, but it was people in general. It was mainly the lack of space, books are essentially in piles, three deep in one small room. I scattered some piles about three times and got stepped upon.

Still, I got all of the books that I’m going to discuss next (and more) there:

The Adventurous Rebel: Eileeen Graham. C&J Temple, 1949?.

This is a historical adventure for older girls. I am getting tired of the way early twentieth century children’s writers automatically side with the Royalists (oh those gay cavaliers!) all the time. ( Read more... )

I then read (an overpriced copy given the edition and its condition)

Still Glides the Stream: DE Stevenson. Fontana, 1965.Will Hastie returns to the Borders having stayed in the army after the second world war, but, now in his mid thirties, he means to settle and make a go of things at home. He grew up with the family next door, almost counting Rae his brother and Patty his sister, but Rae died in the war, leaving his parents broken and hopeless. Patty now has a fiancée, who should help her, but Will - unaccountably doesn’t like him. A telling picnic gone wrong shows Patty that she doesn’t like him that much either, but Will has gone off to investigate a mystery thrown up by an enigmatic message from Rae that arrived after news of his death. In the south of France, where Rae died, Will discovers that his friend found and married a beautiful Frenchwoman, and she bore him a son, Tom, in many ways Rae to the life again. Will eventually brings them home, where Tom heals his grandparents and Patty feels she should be happier than she is. It's all very gentle, and I liked it more than I did the last Stevenson that I read, although I was in some anxiety that Stevenson would pair off the ‘right' couple (to my mind), something she doesn’t always do.

This book loosely follows up Amberwell and Summerhills with a visit there that reminded me of people visiting Rosamund’s castle in the Abbey series. I read Amberwell when I was too young to grasp it, really. I wanted it to be more of a book about children and their big house than it was, and then it was a long time after when I read Summerhills.

The Treasure of the Trevellyans: Doris Pocock The Commonwealth Library 2 Ward lock 1959

is a perfectly fine family adventure book about the large brood of an impecunious if well regarded artist who inherits the family seat. Given what the weather is like these days, I like that Pocock does not give them a wonderful Cornish summer. It rains. A lot. ( Read more... )

This review may be even more rambling than normal. For one thing, I want to go watch the tennis match that is playing on my TV set. And for another, I am still freaked out by Googling the book title and author name and this morning's entry coming up.

Lorna on the Land by Doris Pocock, Ward Lock, 1946.

( Read more... )