feather_ghyll: Girl reading a book that is resting on her knees (Default)
I read a couple fewer books than last year (47, I think.) As usual, the vast majority were by women and new to me. Most of the children’s books I read were of a higher standard than last year, probably because I’d bought them online (mainly in 2021-22) with greater intentionality than when I physically went into charity shops or second-hand bookshops.

I only read one book by any of the big four, Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Girl reading a book that is resting on her knees (Default)
Manners & Mutiny, Finishing School Book the Fourth: Gail Carriger. Atom, 2015

And so the finishing school series ends, Read more... )

I've changed the style of the journal. Who knows if it will stick, although I can be very lazy!?
feather_ghyll: Back of girl whose gloved hand is holding on to her hat. (Girl in a hat)
Waistcoats and Weaponry: Gail Carriger
Finishing School Book the Third, Atom, 2004


As I’ve said before, I enjoy this series, following Miss Sophronia Temminnick of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing School in a streampunk Britain with supernatural elements. I have to admit that Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Woman lying under a duvet covered by text (Reading in bed)
Curtsies and Conspiracies: Gail Carriger Atom, 2013
Finishing School Book the Second


I probably write the same thing whenever I'm commenting on reading a book in a series, but it is too long since I read the previous book in this series and I hope there won’t be as long a period between this and the next, most especially because this exceeded my high expectations. I truly think it’s a step up from the introduction to the world that was Etiquette and Espionage.

Read more... )
feather_ghyll: Girl reading a book that is resting on her knees (Default)
I’ll post an overview of a few books I’ve read over the holidays eventually, but this post is a look back at 2015, following a tradition started by my first post of 2015 when I said I looked forward to the next adventures of Wells and Wong. Well, Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens (in which the 1930s schoolgirls investigate another mystery, this time in Daisy Wells’s country house home) lived up to my expectations. I enjoyed Kate Saunders’s Beswitched, originally published a few years ago, but taking the reader back to a 1930s boarding school, a fraction more, even. I loved reading Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery and Gail Carriger’s Etiquette & Espionage.

Turning to hadrbacks, I enjoyed The Little Betty Wilkinson by Evelyn Smith, even though I think she’s written better books. I did read a book each by the ‘big four’: Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chudleigh Hold, Sally’s Summer Term by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Tomboys at the Abbey by Elsie J. Oxenham, which I didn’t review, and For the School Colours by Angela Brazil.

(In the first paragraph, I build up to my favourite and do the opposite in the second.)

Perhaps the best book I read this year was ‘Rose Under Fire’ by Elizabeth Wein, which is wonderful and harrowing, and I feel incapable of writing about it. I also really loved Helena McEwen’s Invisible River.

I reread Katherine L. Oldmeadow’s The Fortunes of Jacky, which stands the test of time, and now I have no more Oldmeadows to reread. I am, obviously, looking out for more by her in all the shops that sell second-hand books! I hope to read the next case Hazel Wong writes up and the second in the Finishing School series, but I expect to read EBD's 'Fardingales' as I have a copy in the depths of my 'to read' pile.

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