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The Swallows’ Flight: Hilary McKay. Macmillan, 2021

This book mainly follows four humans and a dog. We are introduced to ( Read more... )

The Polkerrin Mystery: Phyllis I. Norris, Frederick Muller 1949

The four Treherne children are hastily evacuated from London to the family home, Polkerrin House, in Cornwall, ( Read more... )

Malory Towers, a Wise Children production (2019)

Starring: Izuka Hoyle (Darrell Rivers), Rose Shalloo (Mary Lou Askinson), Renee Lamb (Alicia Johns), Rebecca Collingwood (Gwendoline Lacey), Francesca Mills (Sally Hope), Vinnie Heaven (Bill Robinson) and, in this performance, Stephanie Hockley (Irene Dupont)
Adapted and directed by: Emma Rice.


This musical adaptation is to be found these summer holidays in ( Read more... )

The Morning Gift: Eva Ibbotson Arrow 1994

The next book in my chronological reread of my Eva Ibbotson books, and I’ve enjoyed devouring it, seeing echoes of the heroes, heroines and Viennas of her other books. ( Read more... )

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, Bloomsbury 2008.

I devoured this last weekend – abandoning any fellow feeling with correspondents waiting days for answers to their questions. It’s been a while (by which I mean over nine years) since I bought it and read it, though I remembered some bits.

As I said in my last post, it was seeing the trailer of the movie adaptation that spurred me into doing so, and I am curious as to how they’ll turn an epistolary novel, with letters from so many islanders into a film. Either characters will be dropped or combined. Mike Newell is directing, which gives me confidence, and I like many of the cast, even if Lily James is a touch on the young side to be playing Juliet. They seem to have cast a lot of actors who were in Downton Abbey, which is a canny choice. I'd hoped they'd filmed in in Guernsey, but read that they hadn't because it's a tax haven/much changed.

Rereading the book, it’s striking ( Read more... )

The Encircled Heart: Josephine Elder, Girls Gone By, 2012 reprint. (First published 1951)

Two words from the same root came to mind as I started reading this book: absorbed and absorbing. ( 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 Chalet School and the Lintons: Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Chambers 1940 reprint

I’d previously read this story as split into two by Armada. It was nice to have it all in one hardback volume, although I managed to slosh some coffee over it at one point.

The story is that Gillian and Joyce Linton( Read more... )

How the Girl Guides Won the War: Janie Hampton Harper Press 2010
Read over July and August 2011

The war in question is the second world war, and while the book itself doesn’t really bear out the claim of the title, it does show the extremely important role that Guiding played during that period in Great Britain, the Channel Islands, Continental resistance movements, internment camps on the other side of the world and afterwards. It’s woven together from all kinds of sources – the most gripping are usually the words of the girls and women themselves, either recorded at the time or speaking with hindsight. ( Read more... )