feather_ghyll: Boat with white sail on water (Sailboat adventure)
The Fortunes of Prue: Bessie Marchant. Ward Lock, published as part of the Sovereign series.

Orphaned Prue, age unknown, and her older brother Theo are travelling to London Read more... )
feather_ghyll: drawing of a girl from the 1920s reading a book in a bed/on a couch (Twenties girl reader)
Nelson’s Budget for Girls

I very rarely buy annuals or collections of stories like this as I generally dislike short stories, so the balance of stories I like to the ones I don’t makes me wish I hadn't bothered to purchase a book that takes up more space than a more satisfactory long story would. This book is massive. Put this purchase down to a moment of weakness.

In fairness, Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Boat with white sail on water (Sailboat adventure)
Glenallan’s Daughters: Bessie Marchant Nelson (no date, although it was awarded as a Sunday school book in 1935)

I misread the title and thought this was about Glenallan’s Daughter, assuming for a few chapters in that it would be around the first of the two girls introduced, Kitty, who is perhaps the more prominent. (I have no excuse, the illustration on the front is of two girls.)

First things first, however, Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Boat with white sail on water (Sailboat adventure)
Oh dear, over a month since I posted last! I haven't read that many books and I didn't feel that it was worth posting merely to say that I dipped in and out of the Statoil Masters Championship on the Saturday. None of the matches fully grabbed my attention, not even the last doubles (Macenroe and Barani vs Wilander and Macnamara), but it was perfect background TV.

On the Track: Bessie Marchant. Sampson Low

I bought this with a vague idea that it was about trains. It’s not, the track is something to do with mining for silver. The subtitle is ‘Among the Torches of the Andres’.

I believe it’s the first Bessie Marchant book that I’ve read without a significant female character, although it’s very much her type of adventure story, with the hero going through several incredible events.

Read more... )
feather_ghyll: drawing of a girl from the 1920s reading a book in a bed/on a couch (Twenties girl reader)
Rereading Sylvia's Secret

Sylvia's Secret A Tale of the West Indies: Bessie Marchant (Blackie)

I know I've read this book before, but I didn't remember anything about it, however everything seemed oh so familiar, because it is a generic Bessie Marchant adventure story, like the last one that I read, but didn't write about (The Unknown Island) on an exotic island, with a strand of racism that made me cringe. Halfway through, I went searching and found this article from the Dictionary of Literary Biography on Bessie Marchant. It contains some biographical details and an overview of her (numerous) books, using a few as examples.

These quotes stayed with me and influenced the rest of the reread:

Women are weak, yet capable, in these novels, and in that paradox contemporary readers can see something of the flux that women's roles were in during the first part of the twentieth century.

and

Marchant's readers could not have taken her novels seriously. They are at best escapist melodramas, filled with outrageous coincidences, offering the young women who read them safe, uplifting adventures that seemed exotic but which were, in actuality, not at all far from home.

Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Girl reading a book that is resting on her knees (Default)
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. Read more... )

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, Read more... )

I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which was recommended by [livejournal.com profile] callmemadam among others.

And then I read a Bessie Marchant, A Girl of the Northland, Read more... )

The latter was an interesting precursor to reading A Cousin from Canada by May Wynne, Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Girl reading a book that is resting on her knees (Default)
I'm posting this so that I have a clean slate for the next book that I want to review. Here’s what I’ve been doing lately that might be of interest…

The Youngest Sister is typical Bessie Marchant, a girl’s coming of age in an exotic local with a smidge of romance and an attempt at Romance in the old-fashioned sense. Although her heroine criss-crosses across the vastness of Canada, you’d think that only half a dozen people lived there because she keeps coming across the same folks. There’s some mildly interesting character stuff about the eponymous heroine’s attempt to make up for a life where she let her (apparently) more capable sisters do everything for her, but BM feels the need to have peril or disaster strike in EVERY. SINGLE. CHAPTER. Which gets tiresome.

I have forgotten everything I ever learned about Canada and flying in the 50s or 60s, which is a shame because teaching me that stuff was the sole point of Shirley Flight, Air Hostess in Canadian Capers. Spectre Jungle by Violet Methley featured a bunch of really hard-to-like snots, racing against an American adversary in Borneo to find a mysterious simian - the spectre of the title.

More PC was Tangara by Nan Chauncy, which didn’t quite pull off its rather familiar trick of having a twentieth-century girl be able to slip through time and relive the experiences of another white girl, who befriended a Tasmanian Aboriginal girl, just before her people were massacred. Speaking of history, The Wind Blows Free teaches us what use can be made of cow pats (it’s a bit Little House on The Prairie).

I’ve also been reading The Crackerjack Girls’ Own. I don’t normally like these annuals – I like longer stories, where narrative covers up perfunctory writing, but it was cheap and featured a story by Anne Bradley. It turned out to be a pleasant enough collection to read before going to sleep – which isn’t how I normally read books, I’m far too likely to end up reading until the wee hours otherwise.

I read Mistress Pat, the sequel to Pat of Silver Bush. Poor Jingle. Montgomery had to do something REALLY, REALLY DRASTIC to get Pat out of her stubborn rut. I think one of the problems with these two books is weird choices in terms of the passing of time. (They’re also overshadowed by better things she’s done – the Annes, Emilys and Blue Castle.)

Angela Brazil’s Schoolgirl Kitty features an arty family that loses a mother and goes to France. This gives AB a chance to lecture on Art, and provide some ‘exotic’ drama (this being quite a few decades before Spectre Jungle and Shirley Flight).

I read four Miss Silver mysteries in quick succession; I have a fifth to read but I’m a little tired of the formula, so I’m putting it off. It’s always like that with the Miss Silver books, either feast or famine in terms of seeing them on the shelves of shops.

Blue for a Girl was a (somewhat scattershot) account of the Wrens’ history in world war 2. While writing about the Admiralty et al’s sexism, the male writer displays his own chauvinism. I felt that the book was written for people in the inner circle too. I’d have preferred it if it had been more rigorous chronologically, instead of having chapters based on theme, with the writer changing direction unexpectedly every few paragraphs.

Cinemawise, I watched The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was based on a book that was influenced by other fantasy books. A modern family, flirting with dysfunction, meets old-fashioned (but well-rendered) faerie folk – although the troll was rubbish. There were problems of scale. I hardly ever believed that the whole wide world as the kids knew it was in danger, and I couldn’t but compare it unfavourably with The Neverending Story

Nim’s Island could have been based on a book – I don’t think it was – with its theme of a storyteller lying within us all and it being a lonely person’s way of reaching out. It wasn’t a very good film though.
feather_ghyll: Tennis ball caught up at mid net's length with text reading 15 - love (Anyone for tennis?)
I have been meaning to use this for nearly a fortnight, but couldn't find much on an excuse. Noting that I've been watching the French Open (hurrah for today's final being the one the world wanted!)? Well, there, I did that. I like both Federer and Nadal. There's a part of me that wants Federer to win the French and then Nadal can have Wimbledon, although if he did lose the French, would that crush him a little too much and would he be able to adapt his game enough?

Other thoughts, I'm no convinced that it's equal pay for equal work (ie right and fair) for the women's champion to earn as much prize money for being out for just over an hour and playing two sets, when the men's champion could potentially be out there for hours on end playing five sets. (Well done, Henin, by the way!)

Having said that, despite issues with the quality and the sometimes bludgeoning play, I love women's tennis as one of the few real-world sports where women athletes have a high visibility and respect. They run full tilt, stretch their limits, grunt and struggle and win and lose. I did play hockey at school, but not lacrosse (and certainly not well enough to be parachuted into the school team and strike the winning goal), netball but not cricket, and tennis, so I got the adventures of Katharine Gordon, Blossom Willoughby and her from the Trebizon books.

The only reference to tennis that there's been in one of the Girls Own books I've been reading of late is in Bessie Marchant's 'By Honour Bound', where the heroine, a new girl in the sixth, an all-round scholar, helps the school win a yearly cup against a boys' team. Her name was not Serena Williams. I rolled my eyes a fair bit.

The advert for Eurosport's coverage of the Stella Artois championship - shots of the players, especially Leighton Hewitt and his wife, and the track is 'I'm Mad About the Boy' - amuses me no end.

I did have plenty to say about tennis, apparently. I do have a review in the works, but I need to redraft it so that it reads more like a review than a frothing, incoherent rant.

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