feather_ghyll

Seven Sisters at Queen Anne’s: Evelyn Smith. Blackie, my copy is inscribed 1933

Seven sisters? Yes, the scenario set out in the book’s title is a lot, ( Read more... )

Here are a couple of links:

From Silver Petticoat Review Why you should read Mary Stewart.

This feature delves into the appeal of Stewart’s romantic suspense books from the perspective of someone who'd just found them. I started reading them as a teenager and return to them as comfort reads, so I have no objectivity, but the points made here resonated.

Wales Online* started the year an article on charity shops and the bizarre and valuable objects that have come in to be sold, and why there are far fewer bargains to be found, although there’s still always the possibility of one. I’ve been going to charity shops since I had pocket money, chiefly for the books – I have to be in the mood to look for clothes, but I have certainly brought many an item over the years. My gravy boat came from a charity shop.

And a couple of days ago, Andy Murray announced he will soon be forced to retire from tennis early due to his hip. Much has been said on the subject of his wonderful career, and I've always supported him since seeing him as a scrawny, talented teenager matching and besting good players. While I've never been a fan of the swearing, like most Welsh and Scottish people, I understood where his 'supporting whoever's playing England' comes from. We saw him work and mature and succeed. While he wasn't quite able to push the big three consistently, and what an era to play in, his achievements: the three grand slams, the Davis Cup, many tournaments and two back-to back Olympic golds are great. Dunblane must be very proud.

As for the Australian Open, I feel the women's side is more open than the men's. Will this be the year Zverev makes his breakthrough in the slams, or is it still too early?

^It's not a great website pop-up wise.

Both from The Guardian:

Where are all the heroines in YA fiction?: firebird

This feature wanders away, somewhat, from the original question, to discuss covers and marketing, but ends with some recommendations.

Here is an obituary for Mary Stewart, who has passed away at the age of 97, by Rachel Hore. I found it sympathetic and enlightening about certain aspects of Stewart's books. I greatly enjoyed her romantic suspense novels.

Some biographical information on Katherine L. Oldmeadow and a review of Princess Prunella here, which I first read when I was young enough that going to France did seem like a remarkable event to me.

Lyzzybee has written an enthusiastic review of Eva Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea that doesn’t give too much of the plot away but gives a good idea of what to expect and why you should read it (if you haven’t).

Mystery subgenres explained in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

I know it's been a while, perhaps this post will explain why. Having just finished her Touch Not the Cat, I was looking forward to reading Mary Stewart’s A Walk in Wolf Wood, but it took me about a week and a half to do so – this is odd for me, as I was reminded when I devoured the nest book that I read in two sittings, interrupted only by a night’s sleep. I didn’t have the same desire to read on with Wolf Wood. I’d force myself to read a chapter and put the book down, and although I was busy and tired from being busy since I begun the book, I had little compulsion to pick it up and read it until I was on a train and had finished my other reading material (newspaper, magazine). Now, I’ve read and reread (or would lapped up be more apt?) all of Stewart’s suspense novels for adults over the years – not the Arthurian novels though. Off the top of my head The Moon-Spinners and Nine Coaches Waiting would be my favourite. So, when I saw that she’d written a book for children, I was intrigued and bought it. I decided to read it having enjoyed rereading Touch Not the Cat (and there’s a whole other enjoyment in rereading it and not wondering who ‘Ashley’ is – I was puzzled and misdirected in the first read.

But having finished Wolf Wood, I won’t be going out of my way to purchase any more Stewarts for children.

( Read more... )

I also managed to tear the dust jacket a little carting this book about when I wasn’t reading it.

In better news, after a bout of rummaging at my parents', I now have got hold of all my Dorothy L. Sayers and Annes and Emilys (so I can reread them) and found Toby of Tibbs Cross, which I knew I had bought and read, but had slipped beneath a bookcase that was itself blocked by boxes. I didn't whoop with joy, but I was grinning for quite a while.

I thought I'd mentioned beginning this, but I had it mixed up with the last annual I read, The Big Book of School Stories for Girls. The British Girl's Annual was 'compiled by the editor of Little Folks' and published by Cassell and Company Ltd in 1918.

I've been reading no more than a story a day, and actually less frequently than that, so I'm edging two thirds of the way through. I've just finished my second Violet Methley story, 'Her Wits' End', which is less noteworthy than the first of Methley's stories in the annual, 'A Daughter of the Legion'. ( Read more... )

The weekend before last weekend - sorry, this post has been one of the things I've never got round to sitting down and finishing until now - I saw a copy of 'Amberwell' by D. E. Stevenson with a dust jacket. As it was in a second-hand book shop, I didn't even pick it up, let alone look at the price. I have a hardback of my own, one that I bought thinking it was a children's book, perhaps if it had had a dust jacket I'd have been disabused of the notion. At first, the story is about a generation of children living in a house named Amberwell, but it follows them as they grow up and lead lives that would have been difficult even without the outbreak of the second world war, and, in fact, adult problems and mistakes blight their childhoods anyhow. So it's not a children's book at all. I was probably too young for it when I read it, because the bitterness and disappointments that the characters faced, and, maybe, the lack of a clear protagonist threw me. I read the sequel several years later and that may have been too long a wait, I'd reread 'Amberwell' at least once since, and 'Summerhills' felt like a different novel, and it lacked the focus on a place, although it did resolve some of the unfinished strands of the first book.

My favourite Stevenson book - so far, I've only read a handful of hers, and annoyingly haven't seen any new-to-me copies lately - is 'Miss Buncle's Book', which doesn't have that twist of, well, bitterness that's in 'Amberwell'. It's about a spinster and the village that she lives in. Our heroine Barbara is neither young nor middle aged, IIRC, and loves her village, but has something in her that can make her see it with a slightly removed perspective. And so she starts to write a book about it, a shadow narrative about the village's life, that imputes motives and expands mysteries, not nastily, because Barbara Buncle is a darling. But the story grows in the telling, as stories do, and contains a fantastical element - and has to be published. Once it is, Barbara in a tricky position. She's changed in the writing of her book and the book has changed her village.

It's altogether charming, I loved the book-within-a-book aspect and insight into the writing process. I've read one of the sequels, which isn't so much lesser as feeling quite different. Sequels that revisit characters' lives are a trait of Stevenson's (who, yes, is related to Robert Louis), so although not all the books are linked in an Oxenham or Brent-Dyer way, you do sometimes get the opportunity to find out what happened next. It's apt that not all the books are linked, some of them are quite different - you never know how light the mood will be with her, but their setting is always important.

Last weekend too, I reread 'Ballet Shoes', which was fun (particularly Posy's monomania for ballet). I was going to review it, but my notes were a little harsh. The thing is, I can't remember when I did read 'Ballet Shoes' first, but I suspect I was a teenager and not a child, so I didn't grow up with it, and the ballet dancer I took to heart young was Veronica Weston, and the young performers, the enterprising Blue Door theatre group. As such, even the first time I read Ballet Shoes, I was probably distanced, which is partly why I didn't empathise with any of the Fossils exactly, and found them a little quaint because there's this mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Usually, difference of period or location doesn't phase me but this time it did, especially their genteel poverty (oh, Gum, you selfish man!). Also, I'd have liked more detail on the ballet school's life, although I know that the story's about the Fossils, their family circle and their lodgers. I've also got 'The Painted Garden' (there's a mention of 'The Secret Garden' in 'Ballet Shoes', was it Streatfeild's favourite book?) to read, now there's a book I ought to reread, ('The Secret Garden') though I don't know if I have a copy.

What I suppose I'm getting at is how much subjective experience informs whether I take a book to heart. It all depends so much on what books are available in your childhood, in libraries or in shops, and whether your reading age is a bit beyond your actual or emotional age (or if you're reading something pitched younger, whereas if I had read 'Ballet Shoes' when I was closer to the girls' age, it might be one of my favourite books). Of course, there are other reasons to love books, and this blog is all about books that transcend reading age.

A D.E Stevenson page and another.