**** Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell

The setting for Brook Evans is Normal, Illinois in 1888.  When I first picked the book up I thought it was going to be about a man, but Brook Evans is the daughter of Naomi Kellogg.

Naomi is in love with Joe Copeland who is the only son of a widow and works their farm which adjoins the Kellogg farm.  His mother thinks she's a cut above everyone else and nobody is good enough for her son, so secretly, Naomi and Joe meet under the willow tree near a Brook, hence the name Brook for their daughter.

"... her hand was on moss deeper and smoother than velvet, ..."

Resting in her bedroom which was always very special to Naomi, just thinking about Joe.

"The magazine lay under her hand, drowsily she thought of Italy, a land of romance.  The perfume of roses came in through her window, there was that good smell of drying hay - full clear song of the thrush.  The water of the brook - waters of Venice.  Ardent whispers, through the centuries.  She was close to Joe.  His eyes were loving her.  His voice whispered."

Unfortunately Joe dies unexpectedly when he is hit by the thrashing arms of his new combine harvester.  This is a tragedy not only for Naomi but the family an unwed mum.

"If you would and for my sake - stand a little disgrace?"  she asked timidly.  "Mostly it would be for just me. Then I would go away and make my living for my child.  O father, I would like that so much better."

"...and words Mrs Copeland and her father had used ... they were like rats."

 In comes Caleb Evans who has always liked Naomi and says he will marry her, even with the child.  They do so and move to Colorado farming country, east of the Rockies.

Caleb is very religious, he is good in his pious way, but Naomi never loved him and she never grows to love where she is, her only love is Brook and Brook is closer to her father not knowing that she is not his daughter.

Brook is invited to a dance by Tony Ross a  part Indian mostly Italian boy.  Her mum makes her a most beautiful dress in a pale yellow, Brook looks lovely in it.  Against her father's wishes with her mothers push she goes to the dance.

"This boy would not be riding to this love had there not been Joe, it was almost as if he were Joe, thus riding through the light sent down from Big Chief."

I think here Naomi equates Tony, of Italian heritage, with that long ago day of dreaming in her bedroom, of romance and Italy.

Joe, aided by Naomi, secretly courts Brook.

Caleb says:

"Turned from her he ventured:  "Well maybe you and Brook'll have a good time here together.  Kind of like a visit just you two."

Tears surprised her; even though he had not turned to her she turned back.  Words she so sorely needed - but could not accept from him."

Sylvia Waite is a missionary back for a while to visit with her mother before going off again, they all attend the same chapel.

"Outside she could hear Sylvia Waite's voice and Brook's acquiescence.  She moved nearer the dress twisted marked with tears.  She put her own hand upon it, as if seeking strength for what she had to do."

"Oh, there must be that little girl - sweet baby voice - not barren years with Caleb Evans."

While Caleb is away she knows that Tony is planning to ask Brook to elope with him, she approves of this, although Brook doesn't know she knows.  Brook leaves the house this will be the last time she sees her, as Tony is planning to take her to California and get married.  This is Naomi's sacrifice for her daughter's happiness.

"What would happen if every one were to give up what there was between what they were supposed to know and think, and what they really did know and think?"

There is a terrible twist in these events, which leads Brook to go off with Sylvia Waite on her missionary endeavors to Turkey, and her father signs the papers needed for her to leave the country.

The bitterness of this for Naomi, it is too much, she never sees her daughter again as she also has never returned home to see her family.

In Turkey Brook meets an English officer Bert Leonard and marries him, they have a son together Evan.  Time passes WWI comes and Bert is severely injured.  For a long while Brook nurses him, he dies and she decides to go and live in France.  Where she is courted by her husband's Colonel, Colonel Fowler, who all think she will marry.

Over the years her mother's family have written to her and she to them, they let her know that her aging father Caleb is living with them in Normal, her mother long since dead and will she come home to see him?

By chance at a party a friend is giving, she meets Eric Helge.

While in Paris:

"Ici!  she called rapping.  In this window was one dress.  Yellow you would call it, only it was more like light than like any color, unless it was like champagne ..."

Evan asks:

"For whom then?" he demanded."

"For my mother", she said, and he had never seen her face like this."

"Oh, you are lovely, Mother,"  her boy cried (Oh, you are lovely, darling!"  she heard the other voice, the voice she had not heard for twenty years."

Thus after all these years she understands, she is reconciled to her mother.

More happens, the book has an interesting ending it seems to come full circle.

I read half the book as it is divided by being marked as four books with chapters.  I read two and then put it down for a while, picked it up again with a fresh eye and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I would rate it  **** four stars on my Persephone 100 ratings.

Christy

***** Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy a Persephone Book

Set in Victorian Bayswater, London.  This is a story about Anglo-Jewish families of the time, written by Amy Levy, referred to as the Jewish Jane Austen.  Although it seems these days that many writers are referenced as the something Jane Austin, but I digress.

It is about how little there is for a young woman to do except to marry well, and for an aspiring young man of promise to marry very well.

The main character is Reuben Sachs a beloved son and grandson of whom great things are expected.  He is a lawyer and now working for a local bi-election candidacy.  It is said of him -

He came straight across the room to old Solomon, a vivifying presence - Reuben Sachs, with his bad figure, awkward movements, and charming face, which wore tonight it's air of greatest alertness.

He is loved and loves a distant cousin who he has known from childhood, from a poorer family, and bought up in the family of a better off aunt.

...the whole face wore for the moment a relaxed dreamy, impassive air, curiously Eastern, and not wholly free from melancholy.

The settings in the book are mostly in one relatives parlour or another, gathered for various festivities.

Conversation flagged, as it inevitably did at these family gatherings, until after the meal, when crabbed age and youth, separating by mutual consent, would grow loquacious enough in their respective circles.

... the great majority gay with that rather spurious gaiety, that forcing of the note, which is so marked a charateristic of festivities.

That is so true, I have been at, let's call them do's and have felt that way.

There is a young family friend, from a very well to do English family, he is certainly a most eligible bachelor, although not Jewish, but by marrying him Judith Quixano would be elevated to a different level in the social strata and it certainly would be very good for her relatives too.

Generally speaking, the race instincts of Rebecca of York are strong, and she is less apt to give her heart to Ivanhoe, the Saxon knight than might be imagined.

I think said Leo "that he was shocked at finding us so little like the people in Daniel Deronda."

So it is for Judith as she loves Reuben, but Reuben must marry money MMM.  Her father -

He was one of the world's failures; and the Jewish people, so eager to crown success, form, so  ... have scant love for those unfortunates who have dropped behind in the race.

They acted and reacted on one another, deceiving and deceived, with the strange unconscious hypocrisy of lovers.

I felt this book so caught the nuances of Jewish life, a circle orbiting within a circle, sometimes touching, but never meshing.

The Jew it may be remarked in passing, eats and dresses at least two degrees above his Gentile brother in the same rank of life.

...What help is there?  There is no help, for all these things are so.  A. C. Swinburne.

Reuben Sachs is not a long book but it carries you along very quickly, although the settings and plot are predictable, the verbiage, flow and wit of writing is smooth.

I loved it and therefore will rate it a 5 Star, I know not all would agree.

Christy

***** The Fortnight In September by R. C. Sheriff a Persephone Book

I just loved this book.  It's about an everyday suburban family taking their annual fortnight holiday.  The time period is about 1920s.  There is mum and dad, a teenage daughter who works at a dress makers, a teenage son who has just started at an office in the City and a younger son still at school.

The evening before a busy time of last minute preparation,  don't we all relate to that.  When they all come home from work and school, father's special list carried over from year to year refined and upgraded.  His rituals before the household departs.

He always had an absurd pang of sorrow when he locked the tool shed door each year before going away ..

He thinks - The man on holiday becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently ...

One gets further insight how things might have worked out differently for him.

A wonderful description of the train journey, through Clapham Junction, they have taken this journey each year for many years and know every changing of the box junctions.

At last they heard rumping of it as it came over the bridge just round the corner ...

Each year they go back to the same Guest House, ran by a widow and becoming a little more run down, but they are loyal and know that the board they pay is important to the land lady, even though many have left over the years.

I loved the insight into how sometimes one feels on holiday.

They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday; the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left vaguely wondering what you are going to do, and how you are going to start.  With a touch of panic you wonder whether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey...

One of the delightful passages in the book is the acquiring of a beach hut.  Could they afford it?  But it would be so very nice, and makes one feel well richer some how.

...that sudden pride that comes to cautious people when on rare occasions they boldly step beyond the ranks of those around them ...

It is said that Sherriff had in mind Bognor Regis when he wrote this book, but I could so easily see it applying to any number of link English seaside towns, equally well to link Southwold in Suffolk which I visited last year, especially with the Victorian Guest Houses and all those Beach Huts there.

Do read it.  I rate this one as a Five Star *****

Christy

***** The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield a Persephone Book

I've started on the Provincial Lady in Wartime, but as soon as I began reading The Home-Maker, I'm afraid I ditched the former book.

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield is one of Persephone's American author choices. Set in 1920's mid town USA, in a town not too near other towns.  We come to know the Knapp family.  Lester the father, Evangeline the mother, Helen 13, Henry about 10 and little Steven about four.

Lester works at the only department store in town.  Old Mr. Willing's has died and now his nephew has taken the reins.  He is young in his thirties and wants to move the department store into the 20th century.

Lester quite college to marry Eva, taking a job in the accounting office at the department store, he loathes his job.  Eva went straight into being a house-wife; these were the expected norms of the time.

Eva is efficient her house is a bandbox, dinner is delicious, at the stroke of the hour.  But everyone seems to suffer from stomach problems.  Although on a limited budget she can make anything out of an old discarded piece of clothing, she has style and the eye for it.

Lester had come home to dinner and has told them that he has been passed over yet again for a promotion.  As she says:  There never would be anything else for her, never, never!  But is was Bitter!  She looked wicked.  She felt wicked.  But she did not want to be wicked.  She wanted to be a good Christian woman.  she wanted to do her duty.

Eva was at constant war with Stephen they butted heads all the time.  As Lester left the house after another confrontation was in the works he thinks.  The opinion of a man who couldn't make money was of no value, on any subject, in any body's eyes.

One day he goes into work and is told that he is to be let go.  On leaving work he's in a daze, he'd be better off dead to his family at least they'd have the insurance money.  His neighbor's chimney is on fire, he rushes up and falls off the roof.  He is taken home paralyzed.

You must read this book to see how it all works out.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book.

Evangeline held the suit up, looking at it and thinking gratefully how it would help some woman through a difficult year in her life.  She remembered suddenly the Mrs. Warner who had so pathetically longed for that bright green sports sweater.  This would satisfy her wistful, natural longing for pretty things and yet be quite suitable for her age.  Evangeline had so much sympathy for women struggling with the problem of dressing themselves properly at difficult ages!

So relate to that.

The two were silent father and son.  Lester said to himself, shivering, "What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings!  Absolute, unquestioned power!  Nobody can stand that.  It's cold poison.  How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!"

Another quote:

"He that is down need fear no fall, 

He that is low, no pride,"

said Lester Knapp aloud to himself.  It was a great pleasure to him to be be able to say the strong short Saxon words aloud.

This reminds me of Winston Churchill's writings:

Used to rally his countrymen and the English-speaking peoples in the dark days of the Battle of Britain. The best remembered words sound like this:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The words Churchill used are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, the old short words he thought best of all. 

She came to feel that talking to Father, when they were alone together, was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up.  Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figuring things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn't know where she had begun or how to stop the wild whirl racing around in her head.  But now, with father to hang on to, she could unravel those twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get at them

I had so many more quotes referred to in my notes but I think I would over whelm you, so will stop here.  Do read the book.


I've been thinking that after I've read all 100 Persephone books, I would somehow like to list them by preference, but one to one-hundred would be too complicated, so I came up with the idea of 5 categories.  So the 5 Star Rating would go to the top twenty books and so on down the line to 1 Star.

Of course this is just within the Persephone Books which I already consider at the best end of a good read.

5 Stars *****

Christy

What I've Been Reading, Midnight In Peking by Paul French and Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

Midnight in Peking, the year is 1937 Pamela Werner's body is found near The Fox Tower on a piece of no mans land.  This is a time when Peking is being closed in upon by the Japanese, many Westerners are leaving if they can, many can't as they are the flotsam and jetsam who have left Europe over the last decades, many being white Russians, add this to fortune hunters, diplomats and a very free life style, an underworld of opium and you have a true mystery.

Two detectives investigate the crime, a British detective Dennis and a Chinese detective Han.  It has shocked the elite enclaved mostly European community.  Who could do such a shocking thing a madman?  Must be a Chinese person or could it be one of their own?

These are the questions that haunt the detectives, but as time goes on one can see there is a lot of politics and payoffs involved.  This true story is revisited by Paul French and he does a great job, unearthing and reading through all the correspondence that Pamela's father sent to the foreign office in London after he did his own investigation.  You can come to some very compelling conclusions as to who did it, and why.

It's a great insight into Peking on the cuspid of WWII, but so sad that a teenage girls life should end like that.

Full Body Burden.  Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats.  This is also a true story of Kristen Iversen, who lived in a wonderful new housing development built yes withing a hairs breath of Rocky Flats.

Just the name itself Rocky Flat is something you think now where have I heard that?  I can't say I read the whole book because it became very detailed in statistics, but I found the beginning very compelling and read quite a bit.

Did you know that the third worst nuclear disaster happened back in the fifties at Rocky Flats and was not equaled until more recently by Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear disaster that just happened in Japan.  That was kept under wraps and only providence of the wind blowing in the other direction stopped the whole of Denver, Colorado from being contaminated.  Of course one could ask who was contaminated then?

A compelling book to read and probably if I had more time I would read the entire book.  The perfect suburbia of the 1950s gone awry.  People becoming ill and not knowing why, it's all so new and what do they actually do at that plant, the government would never let us live here or build here if it wasn't safe!

Yes the people of 2012 are less trusting or are we?

I may come back and finish this book at some point, it makes you think.

Christy

Downton Abbey

The World of Downton Abbey by Julian Fellowes who wrote the series.

My lunch hour at the park; where I thought it would be fun to share with you some eye candy from the book that accompanies the mini series Downton Abbey.  The visuals are just beautiful and full of interesting information about how ones would have lived back then.  And how the actors felt making the series.

It would be a lovely book to add to your library.

Christy

A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest Gaines

This book was first published in 1993 and is again part of the Boy's school reading.

Set in the sugar plantation area of Louisiana, around 1940s.  It's about the last days of Jefferson a young black man convicted of a murder he did not commit and the growing relationship with Grant Wiggins a local black school teacher.

During the trial Jefferson's defense lawyer portrays Jefferson as sub-human, no better than a hog.


"Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this."

Jefferson's godmother who raised him goes to visit Wiggins and says:


"I don't want them to kill no hog,"  she explains, " I want a man to go to that chair on his own two feet."

At first Grant doesn't want to do this, but Tante Lou, who he lives with is close friends with Emma Glenn and firmly persuades him to take this on.

He has to humiliatingly beseech the sheriffs cousin, as does Emma Glenn who has worked for the family all her life, stubbornly states what she wants and that she is owed this.

I always think of tobacco plantations when I think of the South, but Ernest Gaines grew up in the sugar plantation area of Louisiana and this is where several of his books are set.  Drawing on his childhood experience growing up there.  His books are powerful and moving.  Well worth reading, you truly breath the humid air,  feel the holding onto the tiny shred of pride that is left to them.

Several of his books have been made into films and are well worth watching.

Christy

False Dawn, by Edith Wharton

An interesting read, but it will be the last of Edith Wharton's books that I will read for a while.  This reading too was from an original book, from my library, copyright 1923.

This was possibly the only book of hers that I had a small glimpse of where it was heading, not completely.

Halston Raycie a millionaire and head of the family, lives on Long Island Sound.  There is a wife and three children, two girls Sarah Anne and Mary Adeline, fresher replicas of the lymphatic Mrs. Raycie. and a boy Lewis.

The boy Lewis is about to be sent to Europe for the Grand Tour, which all gentlemen of his era embarked upon to round off their education and turn them into men. 

The dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie's life, was (as his son knew) to found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with...

With a view to this founding of a family it was Mr. Raycie's great desire that Lewis should acquire, while in Europe, some old master pieces of artwork to establish a Raycie Art Gallery.  To this effect he was given $15,000 a great deal of money back then.

"Where is our Byron - our Scott - our Shakespeare?  And in painting it is the same.  where are our Old Masters? ..."

Lewis is in love with his poor orphaned cousin Beatrice, nicknamed Treeshy.  She grew up in Italy a country he will visit.

On his European Tour, Lewis meets a young Englishman while staying in an inn, at the foot of Mount Blanche and they spend an enjoyable evening and day together.  They discuss many things and he encourages Lewis to visit certain not well known chapels, while in Italy and look at the paintings.

His eyes had been opened to a new world of art. And this world was his mission to reveal to others - he, the insignificant and ignorant Lewis Raycie.

"Oh, but it's not a Carlo Dolce; it's a Peiro della Francesca, sir!'  burst in triumph from the trembling Lewis.


His father sternly faced him.  "it's a copy, you mean?  I thought so!"


"No, no; not a copy; it's by a great painter ... a much greater ..."

Needless to say papa Racie was not enamoured of the unknown artists who's paintings Lewis had brought back to the States.  Within a year, with the disgrace of the much acclaimed collection coming from Europe, Mr. Raycie was dead and his wife too.  Leaving Lewis, who married his sweet heart Treeshy, a small allowance of $5,000 per year, in contrast to the millions left to the girls.

Eventually by an insignificant cousin, Lewis was left a small house in New York City, where he decided to show his art collection, now he could actually show these wonderful paintings.  It never caught on.

Fast forward about eighty to a hundred years, the time of the automobile.  A hither to unknown collection of a now famous artist has come to light.  It's been gathering dust in an attic all these years.

I wouldn't race out to get this book.  But it's a short easy read, and Edith Wharton is a time honored American author.

Christy

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I read this book a while ago, it was part of Boosul Boy's summer school reading and since I had not read it and The Scarlet Letter is an American classic, I wanted to read it.

I'm rushing to get this in and another review for my final round up on book reading for 2010.

My first misconception was that the Scarlet Letter was a written letter,  it was in fact an embroidered A on Hester Prynne's clothing.  A for adultery.  First published in 1850. the setting is the early days of the Massachusetts Puritan Colony.

It's a story of adultery, guilt, open and hidden sin, and how this psychologically effects one.

Arthur Dimmesdale is the minister and secret father of Hester's child Pearl, he struggles with conscience and his own weakness.  Roger Chillingsworth, Hester's husband from Europe, revenges himself on the frail psyche of Dimmesdale.

Who was made the stronger of the two?  Hester or Dimmesdale?  Throughout the story it is as if Hester grows and has drawn strength from the public knowledge of her adultery, where as Dimmesdale is shrinking day by day, because of his tormented conscience.  Chillingsworth's revenge eats himself up, as he physically becomes older and wizened.  Pearl who is released from all bounds of society by being rejected by society, has a clear childlike sight into situations that even adults cannot see; as society has boxed their thinking, blinkered their eyes.

 This is a must read for everyone.  It's more than a tale of Puritanical New England, but delves deeper into society how it moves and thinks, and what it means to live outside the accepted bounds of society.

Exerts from the book which have such depth:

...yes these were her realities all else had vanished.


...as if her heart had been flung into the street to trample on.


...sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures.

...occur but once in a lifetime ... she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many a quiet years.  She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present.  Tomorrow would bring it's own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next ...


...than to hide a guilty heart through life ... to add hypocrisy to sin.  and would that I might endure his agony as well as mine.

Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied ..., that she was banished and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere,...

Hester Prynne was able to make a living with her beautiful needlework.


...gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men ... even while sumptuary laws forbade these ... to the plebeian order (from the Latin, lower class, peasant)

The child's attire, was distinguished ... by a fantastic ingenuity, airy charm.


It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation.  She had in her nature, a rich, voluptuous Oriental characteristic, ... a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, ... Woman derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle.


"Pearl" as being of great price, ... purchased with all she had, ... her mother's only treasure.


The child could not be made amenable to rules ... Above all the warfare of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl.


... the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master word, that should control the new and incomprehensible intelligence.


Such passages, such writing and formation of words.


Christy

Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome is an American Classic and required reading at High School, at least in this area.  It's also been made into a film several times.  So I think probably everyone knows the ending of the story.  I do think it is one of Edith Wharton's better books.  She began this short novel while in Paris as an exercise in French, around 1911.  It is based on her long residence in the Berkshires, during which time she had come to know well the aspect dialect and mental and moral attitude of the hill people.

Wharton's novels and novellas that  I have read so far have had an outside narrator to run the thread of the story and Ethan Frome is no different.  As the other books I reviewed, Madame de Treymes. New Year's Day and one I will review False Dawn are all set in High Society, Ethan Frome is set in poor rural farming New England.

"That's my place", said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to answer...

"The house was bigger in my father's time;  I had to take down the 'L' a while back,"

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L";  that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and cowbarn.  Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it is certain that the "L" rather than the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm...

I like the above passage because the house seems to represent their life, the core has been torn away from it.

In happier times when Ethan's father was alive he went to engineering college, but after his father died he had to come home to run the farm.  His mother fell into a long illness and a distant cousin Zeena came to nurse his mother through her illness.  It was said that if his mother had not died in winter, he may never of married Zeena but he did.  She was about seven years older than him, and not long after getting married she herself sunk into a long time illness. Zeena either needs to be nursing, or be nursed.  Early on they had wanted to sell the farm and move to town, for Ethan to pick up on his studies, but they could not sell the farm.

Zeena had always been what Starkfield called "sickly,"..

So indeed it was an isolated stark life at Starkfield Farm. You feel the hardness of life. The fact that they are trapped, both Zeena  because a woman has to be married to have protection and basically just a place to live and Ethan who cannot sell the farm and resume his studies.

Zeena decides that she needs help and invites her cousin Mattie Silver to come and live with them.  Her parents have died and she has run out of visiting all the family.  It seems a good arrangement for both.  Mattie has not been brought up to cook and clean and these come hard to her, plus the fact that she did not arrive in the best of health.  But in the country she begins to bloom.

Zeena has taken note of  Mattie and Ethan's growing closeness and makes remarks that one day Mattie will leave and marry, as Denis Eady has taken an interest in Mattie.

"I guess you're always late, now you shave every morning."


That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about Denis Eady...


Ethan looks after Mattie's interests, picking her up from the village dance.  Watching other young couples going coasting.

"There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she said.

Zeena takes note of all this and arranges for Mattie to leave and another girl to come and nurse her, turning Mattie out on her own to fend for herself.  Ethan is stunned, angry and helpless.


Coasting is sledding.  There is a special hill with a giant elm half way down the run; which has to be navigated around, it is dangerous, but still all in the village go coasting.

Here is the stage.


It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart.

"Matt! You be quiet!  Don't you say it."


"There's never anybody been good to me but you."


"Don't say that either, when I can't lift a hand!"


On the slow drive to the train stop, they decide to take a coast, the one they had promised to take but never had.

He laughed contemptuously:  "I could go down this coast with my eyes tied!"  and she laughed with him, as if she liked his audacity.  Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances.

Earlier in the book you think that Ethan may just run off with Mattie, as there is mention of a man in the area who did just that.  But Ethan is a man who knows his duty.

It's an interesting read, well written.

Christy

New Year's Day, by Edith Wharton

After having read three of Edith Wharton's books; I now realize she had a certain style of taking you down one path dead ending your thinking and totally re-arranging it again.  All three books which I have now read, Ethan Frome; which I still have to write up on, Madame de Treymes and now New Year's Day, all follow this pattern.

Published in 1924 I am again reading from an original copy from the library.  As you can see from the above photographs.

It starts of with a New York family at the turn of the twentieth century gathered together in New York City for New Year's Day.  The narrator at that time a boy of twelve.


"...the New Year's Day ceremonial had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent, and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it..."


Across the street a fire breaks out in The Fifth Avenue Hotel, all the family rush to the window, laughing and making unpleasant remarks about the people rushing out, when they see Lizzie Hazeldean with Henry Prest.

"It was typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words."

"The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable.  No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by "politicians" and Westerners," two classes of citizens whom my mother's intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals."


Lizzie Hazeldean is worried that she has been seen coming out of the Hotel, she walks home to find out that her invalid husband Charles has gone out to see where the fire was.

"Mistress and maid exchanged a glance of sympathy. and Susan felt herself emboldened to suggest;  "Perhaps the outing will do him good," with the tendency of her class to encourage favoured invalids in disobedience."

Lizzie is distort that possibly even her husband saw her coming out of the Hotel.  She goes up to her bedroom.

"It was a rosy room, hung with one of the new English chintzes, which also covered the deep sofa, and the bed with its rose-lined pillow-covers..."

Later Charles comes home but has not changed in his manner towards her at all.  They sit and have tea together.

"She had been one of the first women in New York to have tea every afternoon at five, and to put off her walking-dress for a tea-gown."

Charles urges her to go to a dinner that evening although he is too ill to attend.  She does and so does Henry Prest, they exchange words and part, although not until she has been snubbed by Mrs Wesson.

"It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately "cut"; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York."

Lizzie gets home from the dinner, Charles comes into her room and they share a close intimate moment until his illness takes over and within two weeks he is dead.  After which Lizzie goes to Europe for six months to be with a newly married father.


Lizzie Hazeldean's humble beginnings reminded me a tad of Becky Sharpe, Vanity Fair.  Lizzie's father had been a vicar of some repute in New York City, but had fallen with some scandal and taken himself and Lizzie off to Europe, to grow up.  Here as a young woman she was befriended by a Mrs Mant, who often did good works, but didn't know how to follow though on them.  So having brought Lizzie back into New York society she didn't know what to do with her.  Right at the time when Lizzie sees that she has no means and no friends in comes Charles and using her beauty, perception and whit, within a week they are engaged.

This is the stage for the book and if I told you anymore I would give the plot away, if you could say there was a plot.  But there is a distinct twist in where this goes.

Do read it, it is a novella so will not take long to read.

Christy

Madame De Treymes, by Edith Wharton

Madame De Treymes is a novella, written by Edith Wharton  My son had to read Ethan Frome for school and having not read that, but knew it was an American classic I thought that I should.  So I went to our local library and picked up several of her other books too, including this one.

Our Library although housed in a 1960s building actually dates back to 1700s which if you live in the States will understand is old.  And therefore our library has many old copies of books which are still just sitting on the shelf to be loaned out.  The copy I picked up is dated 1907.  So must be an original copy as it was published February 1907.  With several of those colored plate pages that they used to put in novels back then.

I thought that Edith Wharton might have written this during the time that she lived in France, but that was actually later.  The book shows an understanding of American upper class thinking as opposed to French aristocratic thinking.  Although at the time that this is set before WWI obviously all 'true' French aristocrats had been beheaded.  So why French upper class should think themselves any better than American upper class is beyond me, because neither have a 'pedigree' if you were into all that.

This difference of thought process and keeping family face is the whole premise of the book.

Madame de Malrive, who used to be good old Fanny Frisbee, meets in Parisian Society on old friend from the States, Durham.  Fanny is separated from the Count because of his philandering and has one child a boy.  Really the whole story is based around the boy, although he hardly appears in the book.

"If he had been asked why, he could not have told; but the Durham of forty understood.  It was because there were, with minor modifications, many other Fanny Frisbees; whereas never before, within his ken, had there been a Fanny de Malrive.'

Madame de Treymes is Fanny's sister-in-law.

Durham says, "If I could only be sure of seeing anything here!"

Durham would like to marry Fanny, but the obstacle is the divorce in a Catholic society where divorce is not permitted under any circumstances, and the family cannot be scandalized by this.  Also Fanny wants to take her son if she gets a divorce, here is the key part of the story.

Fanny having married into and living in France understands many of the problems in extricating herself from this family, but as is the case of foreigners living in a country not theirs to know the French thinking and laws to the ump degree is not a domain held by those not born there.

"Perhaps no Anglo-Saxon fully understands the fluency in self-revelation which centuries of the confessional have given to the Latin races, and to Durham, at any rate, Madame de Treymes' sudden avowal gave the shock of a physical abandonment."

Durham sets himself up as a knight in shining armor, a go between, and his contact is Madame de Treymes.

"Durham sat silent, her little gloved hand burning his coat-sleeve as if it had been a hot iron.  His brain was tingling with the shock of her confession.  She wanted money, a great deal of money:  that was clear, but it was not the point.  She was ready to sell her influence, and he fancied she could be counted on to fulfill her side of the bargain...."

I will not tell you the plot, but let me say it has more twists than a cold war spy story.

It is essentially the difference between an American principled thinking, that cannot understand an old French families code of honour.

Do find the book and read it.  It's short but a great study into two societies before WWI.

Christy

The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor

Set in the turbulent 1920's Ireland, when many Anglo-Irish are coming under arson attacks. Although having lived on their affluent estates for centuries. They feel at odds in a land that has been home to them. Here enters Lucy Gault's family. Disturbed and upset by the attempt to set fire to their house, they are thinking of returning to England. Lucy their daughter does not want to go, she loves her home.

On the day they are to leave she runs off. On the search for Lucy her parents mistakenly think that she is dead. They leave as planned and are torn apart by their loss. Lucy returns home and does get to stay there, with the family servants, who get to stay on.

Her parents never truly settle, drifting on to Italy and Switzerland, with no forwarding address for them.

Lucy grows up, lonely and sad. In comes Ralph who she really does love and he her, but feels she cannot commit to love unless she reconciles with her parents. Unfortunately WWII starts and they are left in Europe, where her mother dies. Her father eventually does return to his old estate, but too much time has passed for Lucy to regain what has been lost. Ralph has married someone else.

Eventually Lucy feels somehow responsible for the young man her father wounded defending his home against the arsonists. Trying to make a distorted recompense for her lost and stunted life.

I did not especially like this book, so wouldn't recommend it.

Christy

The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

This is the copy of The Waves I read from:


Somehow I had in mind that the last posting on this was the 28Th, but when I started seeing every one's postings I thought, goodness me it's today Friday and of course living in the States we are already behind time wise. So I'm scrabbling to get my thoughts together. Yes I did meditate on things in my mind but paper and pen must be the fruition of thought.

My first thoughts were do I want to wade into The Waves. Did I want to put all the effort needed into it and be committed to the read. You know that feeling you have when at the seaside on the beach. Shall I change, put the swimsuit on and even if it is on, do I really want to wade into the sea. Once you've stepped in your committed. Salty wet and sand in ones hair, seaweed in ones' toes. Now you have to at some point take a shower and put oneself straight, but then you decide, yes it's worth it, to feel the waves bounce you around from trough to height and down again, and that's how I felt with "The Waves".

First I did not like it as much as Mrs Daloway, or To The Lighthouse. I was greatly remiss in not reading Orlando, but hope to a some point. I need a little distance from Woolf , after reading the Waves.

I would first say don't read this book in a depressed state or even a shade of grey. Humans as Blogland shows, are social interactive people and need this connectivity to blossom and be fruitful creatively. That's why Woolf had her Bloomsbury group. To be to isolated as you felt these characters were is somewhat sad and soul destroying. Did she feel this way later in life? One has to feel she did, because some of the thoughts of the characters I feel are bang on.

Bernard the storyteller, Louis linguistically, the outsider, Neville the homosexual, Susan wife and homemaker, Rhoda suicidal, Jinny the lover. It's not a novel, it's a soliloquy, this thought that thought, flung into the space of mind, orbiting around, but never landing. Never making a connection with terra firma. But never the less, thoughts I'm sure we've all had. These thoughts I think are very age related. I think Woolf captured that. The striving and jostling for position in youth, the middle part of ones life working on the path you have set your foot too. Then the latter part thinking what was all that striving all that work, what was it all about.

Susan seems the most fulfilled.

"In this hot afternoon," said Susan, "here in this garden here in this field where I walk with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires, the hinge of the gate is rusty; he leaves it open. the violent passions of childhood, my tears in the garden when Jinny kissed Louis, my rage in the schoolroom ..."

"I am fenced in, planted here like one of my own trees..."

Neville coming to terms with life.

"I no longer need a room now," said Neville, "or walls and firelight. I am no longer young. I pass Jinny's house without envy, and smile at the young man who arranges his tie a little nervously on the door-step. Let the dapper young man ring the bell; let him find her. I shall find her if I want her, if not, I pass on. The corrosion has lost its bite - envy , intrigue and bitterness have been washed out. We have lost our glory too...."

Rhoda of life says.

"... What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with you greasy paws. Yet those were my life."

Neville at the coming together of the friends.

"Now sitting side by side," said Neville, "at this narrow table, now before the first emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now, openly and directly as befits old friends meeting with difficulty; what do we feel on meeting? Sorrow. The door will not open; he will not come. and we are laden. Being now all of us middle-aged, loads are on us. Let us put down our loads. What have you made of life, we ask, and I? You, Bernard; you, Susan; you, Jinny; and Rhoda and Louis? The lists have been posted on the doors. Before we break these rolls, and help ourselves to fish and salad, I feel in my private pocket and find my credentials - what I carry to prove my superiority. I have passed. I have papers in my private pocket that prove it...."

"...Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us - a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name..."

Bernard.

"It was different once," said Bernard, "Once we could break the current as we chose...
We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in order to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. I shall never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the puzzle"

Louis.

"...I luxuriate in gold and purple vestments. Yet I prefer a view over chimney-pots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel."

Jinny.

"... My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea. I am like a little dog that trots down the road after the regimental band, but stops to snuff a tree-trunk ..."

Bernard.

"That goes on. Listen. there is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. that is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up - sober, merciful work which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. how we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!"

The above passage almost flows like a poem from W. H. Auden. The Night Train.

Of course where to stop quoting, where to end this review without becoming tedious.

I don't think I would have tackled Woolf without the incentive of the group. But I am glad that I have and feel the richer for it literary wise.

Now I have a great urge to go back to my Persephone books.

Christy

P.S. Don't forget to leave a comment if you should so wish, as on the 28Th I shall have the drawing for the note cards. I think that's why I had the 28Th in mind.

Evening by Susan Minot

Evening by Susan Minot. From reading the dust cover fly leaf Susan Minot has received good reviews from the New York Times for another of her books Monkeys, which I have not read. This book is a read for my Local Library Book Club, which meets once a month and I have been quite negligent in attending.

The story centers around a three day weekend on an island off the coast of Maine, where Ann Lord attended a friends wedding. Fast forward to Ann Grant in her sixties, who lies in bed, suffering from a terminal illness. Her mind moves between lucidity, past events and delirium. Her memories cross three marriages and five children and one special event that overshadowed the rest of her life and loves.

Ann Grant had a circle of friends used to meeting together in their shared summers, all of them more affluent than Ann's modest background. The story does not really explain how she came to move in these circles of summer houses and motor boats, but she did and here she is for the wedding of her friends. Another invited guest becomes the love of her life, the highest point, she is bowled over, knocked for six and totally swept up in love and surrender.

Arriving late is his fiance, who he finds out, on that very weekend is pregnant. Of course he needs to do the right thing and stand by her, but not by Ann and she doesn't seem to mind, at least not in an angry way, just that their shared life of love has been lost.

I'm sorry, but you felt no build up of words spoken, beautiful scenes and enduring love. Just a few trysts in the boathouse does not make a life spent in an enduring love for one man.

The whole book was very confusing with the backwards and forwards in time and what she really remembered and what she just imagined, on top of the antipathy of her children, waiting for her to die. Also throw in a tragedy on that weekend and one becomes totally swirled around, where is she heading?

I just thought he was, to use old terminology an absolute bounder and a cad. And no way since somewhere in there it alludes to a son Paul who dies, but even that is buried in the dream world, would a person come out of this dalliance as a couple in love for the rest of their lives. In fact it speaks later on of a friend seeing him in Chicago with a young girl hanging on his arm, not his wife and calls him a ladies man. So even the author portrays him as this.

No this was not the great love story, sorry.

So I guess you by now you realize, I did not like this book.

Christy

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Reading To The Lighthouse was easier than reading Mrs Dalloway, because now I'm in step, my mind has caught the rhythm of her writing. I can follow her steps easily in the sand, the distance, the pace, the interlude.

I can imagine Woolf always carrying a moleskin notebook, with a thin pencil that slips into the spine. she would be wearing one of those large baggy twenties cardigans, with turned up cuffs and baggy pockets. and there in a cuff or a pocket she would sequester the notebook, ready at any moment to record a thought, a phrase. Later she sits at her desk, gathers all those ramblings of her mind, in the cup of her hands, and throws them at the canvas of her page, to be sorted re-arranged and assigned.

Of course she may not have done this but this is my image.

I enjoyed this book, a gathering of family and summer guests at their summer house on the Isle of Skye. The setting is based on Woolf's own childhood summers spent in Cornwall, at Talland House in St. Ives. All the description of the scenery is Cornwall. And having just visited the Isle of Skye and also having visited Cornwall and St. Ives, I can ask the question, did Woolf ever visit the Isle of Skye?

The island does not fit her descriptions. First of all Cornwall is a 300 mile train ride from London, the Isle of Skye is over 800 miles.

"Never mind the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny: the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples:"

There is not a town, near a lighthouse, where you could just walk into town. And certainly not one, except for maybe Portree where a visiting Circus would come. But still we can secede to literary license. Just why wouldn't she set it in Cornwall, with the sand dunes and hotter summers. Maybe she did not want to acknowledge too much similarity to her childhood.

The Ramsay family are a large family. Mr. Ramsay a published philosopher in his early sixties, feeling that his best days are behind him academically and Mrs Ramsay in her fifties, the Victorian wife still, although set just before the first world war, about 1912. The visiting guests are Lily Briscoe an artist and single lady in her thirties, William Bankes in his sixties, Mr. Carmicheal a poet and retired teacher who had been in India, and married incorrectly; which had not been helpful for his career; an old former college mate of Mr. Ramsay's. Charles Tansley a student, working on his dissertation. Plus Minta and Paul Rayley, soon to be engaged.

The book opens with the scene of James cutting out a picture of a refrigerator, and his persistant wish to visit the lighthouse; which requires a boat ride across to it. This visit hangs upon a tyrant father's whim and the weather. You feel like two dogs are playing tug of war with a rag, backwards and forwards. James and his mum willing this visit to the lighthouse to happen. Knitting the socks for the lighthouse keeper's son; and measuring them against James's leg to see if they are long enough. Willing this event to happen for her youngest. The father so self-centred, smashing any hopes with cold logic that the weather will be bad tomorrow.

Of course he knew how important this was to James. As all those years later, at the end of the book after Mrs Ramsey's death he demands that James and Cam come with him to the lighthouse. In remembrance of a day never fulfilled.

Mrs Ramsay is an interesting pivotal part of the family, many times mentioned as beautiful.

"But was it nothing but looks people said? What was there behind it - her beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out , they asked, had he died the week before they were married - some other earlier love, of whom rumours reached one?"

This reminds me of Clarissa Dalloway, is there or isn't there more beneath the surface?. In both woman I think there was. I think they lived the lives they wanted.

Bankes's view of her as mother and child and Lily Briscoe's close complicated but rewarding friendship with Mrs Ramsay and the family.

I have to mention the dinner party of Boeuf en Daube. The gathering together of all in their finery in a run down tattered old house. Here again I feel shades of Mrs Dalloway.

"But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking..."

Mrs Dalloway thinks the party is going to be a failure and then says no, no, no the party comes together, just as the Mrs Ramsay's dinner party, after a stilted beginning comes to flow. Lily helps her by engaging the prickly socially inferior feeling young man Charles Tansley.

"... but what haven't I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere."

The book is in three sections, before WWI, Mrs Ramsay dieing, Andrew the son who was close to Mr Carmicheal is killed during the war. Prue another daughter who dies in childbirth as the middle section. Plus the deterioration of the house the visits of a local lady to keep it in order; which is impossible. The house seems to reflect the deterioration and change in the Ramsay family, with so many deaths. And then the return to the summer house after the war.

The final curtain of taking the trip To The Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe at last capturing in her painting the family's summer house.

You have to read the book, you cannot capture or even gain the essence of the book in a short review.

Christy

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway, the events of a single day in which Clarissa prepares for a party.

First of all don't you just love that name, Mrs Dalloway, I think it must have appealed to Woolf too, when Clarissa mistakenly calls him Mr Wickham all day and only finds out at dinner what his correct name is. Sally and Peter take up on this and it becomes an inside joke "Dalloway, my name's Dalloway."

When Woolf wrote this book she was 43 years old. Seven years after the Great War, the war to end all wars. A war that changed everything, a war that had taken her generation from a time of peace and the thought that world peace was in their grasp, to the world of Septimus Warren Smith. This is why I think Woolf has Clarissa not believing in God, possibly this is how Woolf herself felt after the Great War.

I think it's interesting the way Woolf carries three threads in this book. Their youth together, their life now and Warren Smith and his wife.

Her description of Warren Smith's shell shock I think must be amazingly accurate. I have never read a biography of Woolf, but I would be interested to know if she had close friends she knew who were in that state. One would have to think she did. Of course she was older than the generation that went to war. But all were affected by the war.

By the time I reached the end of the book I was thinking exactly these thoughts about Clarissa and Woolf sums them up very concisely.

"But - did Peter understand? - she lacked something. Lacked what was it? She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. ....."

It was Clarissa's charm that made people think that there were greater depths to Clarissa, that really were not there.

"For said Sally, Clarissa was at heart a snob - one had to admit it, a snob. ..."

And the truth was she was a snob and quite shallow. She had married the right person in marrying Richard. He gave her exactly what she wanted. Her social life in London, in Society, her parties. When in fact both Richard and her daughter Elizabeth liked the countryside.

"I love walking in London," said Mrs. Dalloway. "Really it's better than walking in the country."

Her parties,to invite all those people you didn't like but they were your social circle. But to hold yourself above it as if I'm not like them, but she was like them. Would you have very old friends come and visit and just sit them aside until the end of the party, because time must be spent hostessing?

"She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her ..."

But of course Clarissa would, she was the consummate hostess. Appeasing her conscience with the thought that later I can devote my sole attention to them.

Youth and being in ones fifties! Woolf had an amazing clarity of these contrasting times of ones life. Close friendships of youth, that will always stand, what ever you have become in ones fifties, what ever road you travelled to get there, those times together, of youth, stand enchanted, alone. You cannot view the person in ones fifties as being the person of ones youth, and yet they are. Woolf captured this.

"She had the oddest sense of herself invisible; unseen, unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, ....."

Our minds think so many more thoughts than we ever say, but Woolf wrote them.

The scene in Regent's Park is very poignant. All those thoughts of different people watching the aeroplane.

"Ah; but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?"

Clarissa's friendship with Sally, the fleeting kiss.

"Star-gazing?" said Peter.
It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!"

"... She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted, Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath she was very shrewd - a far better judge of character than Sally, ..."

You cannot capture in a review all the elloquence of Woolf's words.

Woolf totally captured the social scene of the time. Mrs Dalloway would be a great book to read if you were writing a social history of the time. The difference between 10,000 pounds per year and 300 pounds per year.

Ellie Henderson the poor, looked down upon cousin, who Clarissa showed a coldness to.

".. by her distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred pounds' income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny) and it made her timid and more and more disqualified year by year to meet well dressed people ..."

Clarissa's insight into Dr. Bradshaw was bang on though. How sad for Septimus and Rezia. The law was behind him. Must! must! must! Septimus had no choice.

Two scenes which I think are very poignant is the one of Septimus and Rezia laughing together over the making of the little hat.

The second is Clarissa standing in her window alone at the party, looking across the street at the old lady going to bed and thinking about the young man who took his own life. Here is where I think all three threads come together, at that very moment.

Woolf herself straddled two worlds and she led us into them.

Looking forward to reading the other three books.

Christy

P.S. The book I read Mrs Dalloway in, was from our library, published in 1928, so quite an old copy. With all sorts of pencil markings, which was rather fun to think about who had taken this book out of the library over all those years, what they found of interest.

BBC Radio 4 Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

BBC Radio 4, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built.

If you enjoyed reading this book, or haven't read it, but would like to listen to it, go to BBC Radio 4 on the internet and listen to the two episodes. They are only there for seven days, so make haste. I think you will enjoy it, I'm listening to it while writing this post.

Enjoy.

Christy

The Lost Art of Gratitude, by Alexander McCall Smith

Isabel Dalhousie is a thoroughly modern woman, from a well to do background. She owns and edits from home, a philosophical journal. Has an eighteen month old boy, Charlie, who loves eating olives and lives with his father Jamie.

A chance meeting with an old acquantance Minty Auchterlonie, gets an invite for Charlie to her son's birthday party, to be held at their prestigious family house in the country outside of Edinburgh. Minty is now a high flying financier. Isabel had always thought of her as a ruthless climber, but her integrity had never been brought into question.

Minty takes Isabel into her confidence over a personal matter, but is Minty being truthful with her or is she using her. Rumors come her way of Minty being involved in a financial bank fraud, plus some other shady dealings. Being the curious Isabel that she is, she just can't say no.

Another dilemma is Professor Dove, her nemesis in the writing world. What's this whole to do about plagiarism?

Her neice Cat is dating a new boyfriend (a tightrope walker!) Isabel has Jamie, her neice's old boyfriend, Charlie's father; and the open question of marriage is still hanging.

Philosophizing, snooping and being just mum, make up this easy read series of books set in Edinburgh.

As the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency has an old worldliness to it. This series has a modern theme about it. Set in Edinburgh in the world of today. I like both series by McCall Smith, and will read more of these books in each series.

Christy