April Books

[slemslempike]

April
Jill's Gymkhana - Ruby Ferguson
A Stable for Jill - Ruby Ferguson
Jill Has Two Ponies - Ruby Ferguson
Jill and the Runaway (Jill Enjoys Her Ponies) - Ruby Ferguson
Thrones, Dominations - Dorothy L Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh
The Brandons - Angela Thirkell
Cheerleader!: An American Icon - Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis
Poetic Justice - Amanda Cross
Hit the Road - Caroline B. Cooney
Daring to Be Abigail - Rachel Vail
Nancy and Nick - Caroline B Cooney
The Paper Caper - Caroline B Cooney
An April Love Story - Caroline B Cooney
The Personal Touch - Caroline B Cooney
Jill's Riding Club - Ruby Ferguson
The Faber Book of Blue Verse - John Whitworth
Rosettes for Jill - Ruby Ferguson

All the Jill books are rereads, and very lovely they are too. I do like Jill, I like that she's quite often a bit stroppy, and has arguments with her mother, and that they named the chickens.

Thrones, Dominations was another reread, but from some time ago. It does read like very strait-laced, doggedly accurate fanfic, because that's what it is, but it seems to lack a lot of the joy that's in better fanfic, a real feeling of appreciation of the characters.

The Brandons - not a reread! I only realised halfway through that I had read books about these people before, I hadn't realised that her books were so connected. I like Lydia Keith, but thought that I would very much like to shake Mrs Brandon very hard indeed. I enjoyed the various besotted men reading her their work though.

Cheerleader! was quite good. I think it failed in its attempt to reconcile academic work and popular work, and was a bit too "omg everyone thinks this is just a shallow subject but it's rilly not". Put slightly more properly, it was very defensive about cheerleading not just being exclusive, privileged and potentially harmful, and because of this I didn't think it really succeeded in problematising either that idea, or the idea that cheerleading is intrinsically good.

Poetic Justice was rather odd. It's by Caroline Heilbrun, who is a theorist I've read before, and I quite like the heroine and the plot, but often the characters are very unreal, and possibly (hopefully) because it's from the 1970s there are strange bits of politics in there. And a frankly racist Chinese professor of Engineering.

I've been loving reading the Caroline B Cooney books. Hit the Road is one of her more recent books, and has a newly-licenced teenage driver assisting her grandmother in kidnapping one of her friends from the care home where she's been forcibly placed by her scheming son. It was quite good - I really liked Brit's terror at the driving, and the way she gradually started to understand how the women must feel about ageing, and wanting to help them resist being forced into positions of dependence. However, I do love her older, 1980s, books best. One thing I noticed was that while they mostly have similarly aged protagonists of 16-20, the older books have older protagonists. They are calmer, more self-assured and introspective. Partly this is a difference in general writing styles, it's a widespread difference from 1980s YA lit to 2000s YS lit, but it's so very marked in Cooney's work that I wonder if she had children that became teenagers in the interim. (There's an interview that suggests that her youngest child was born in the mid 1980s, so it might fit.) It's something about seeming to see herself as the teenagers in the earlier books, but now viewing her characters in a more maternal light.

Daring to be Abigail is a young YA book about a girl who goes to camp for the summer, and is able to be a different person than the socially inept geek at home, but unfortunately the new person turns out not to be as great as she'd hoped. I thought this was really great, very honest about dynamics of groups of children, and also there isn't a neat ending where everything turns out all right, or it's okay because she's geeky too. People get hurt, and apologies don't mean much.

I've written elsewhere about The Faber Book of Blue Verse, so won't go into it again here. I am now reading a collection of actual sexual poetry by Neil Astley (as in, he collected them, not wrote them), which starts by saying that women write most of the sexual verse, so there are more female poets in the collection, which is quite nice.

My next task is to work out what books I will be taking to Edinburgh with me. I'm well aware that they have bookshops, but it seems like a good idea to get through everything I've meant to read but haven't yet got around to. Since I won't have internet at home, I might actually get some reading done!

Comments

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I'm well aware that they have bookshops

:D

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Well, who knows what goes in in Forgeign Lands?

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

Poetic Justice is the one with the strange foreign British drug Paracetamol, isn't it? I liked Amanda Cross a lot in the eighties but she has dated a bit and that one is probably the most political. If you can face any more, try The Theban Mysteries, which is almost a school story, or Death in the Faculty, about sexism and women in academia, which I'd like to think is now out-of-date but probably isn't.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes! I'd forgotten that bit. it was an odd book all round, it took forever for there even to be a mystery to solve, and now I find I can't recall anything about the actual plot. I think I might well try those too - school stories and sexism being some of my Things! I've also just discovered that I have "No Word from Winifred", which involves Santa Cruz (where I studied for a year), Dorothy L Sayers and Mary Renault, so that one will be in a pile as well.

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

I like No Word from Winifred too. I've just found there are three late ones I've never read so it might be time for an Amazon splurge.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Ooh, what a Jillfest! I am such an idiot, I used to have them all then got rid of them and now I'm trying to get them again. Problem is, they must be the hardbacks and I won't pay much.
Mrs Brandon goes on and on in the series and at one point you even start to feel sorry for her.
I've only read one Caroline B Cooney, The Face on the Milk Carton and I thought it was rather good. Have you read that one?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Oh no! It's always an awful realisation when you suddenly discover that you should have kept them. Unfortunately, I think I keep far more than I should. Periodically I debate selling my Oxenhams, but the thought of how much they would cost to replace stops me. I should have a proper reread and work out once and for all what to do.

I have - it's the beginning in a series of four, which are rather good (though the last one is less so - often the way with later books!). I could lend them to you if you're interested? I quite like The Face on the Milk Carton, but it's not one of my favourites. I dearly love Family Reunion, and would highly recommend reading that if you ever get the opportunity.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Yes, every now and then I think I might sell such and such an Oxenham book because it's worth a lot but I'm stopped by knowing I could never get it again.
Kind offer on the Cooneys but I'm happy to wait until I see one for 20p somewhere.

[gair.livejournal.com]

The hardbacks aren't usually too bad - I have a set of first editions of the first four and none of them cost more than £15. (Jill's Pony Trek and Pony Jobs for Jill are hard to find.)... Just looked them up on abe and if you don't mind not having a dustjacket you can get quite a few for under a tenner.

::is huge Jill evangelist::

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I don't know how callmemadam feels, but I wouldn't have the Brockhampton press ones even for so little! I don't mind first editions or not, but I really don't like the feel of those reprints.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip! I agree with slemslempike about the Brockhamptons but they're still better than paperbacks. eBay is probably the best bet. I got a first of Jill's Gymkhana with no dw for very little, then got a photocopy dw from someone else.

[anglaisepaon.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction to Thrones, Dominations. Forgive the pun, but it just lacked the whimsey of the other Lord Peter books.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Heh! I did like Bunter's wedding being much more elaborate than Peter's - there are nice touches and I'd probably have enjoyed it as a fanfic where it was broken down into bits more. I'm still going to read the other one again though.

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

I love and adore Amanda Cross. They can be difficult books to read (attitudes, etc), but I rather suspect she's *not* overstating life as an academic at the time when each was set.

(I even adore Reid, which is unusual for me. I usually view the male hangers-on in female-authored crime fiction to be unneccesary window dressing.)

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that I don't find them believable for the time, as that I don't think they're believable as characters - to me, they read very flat and made-up. I do know academia has 'characters', but I don't think she writes them very well. And in the book of hers I've just finished, she has a few chapters that are ostensibly a woman's journal, and they don't read like a journal at all, even taking into account her 'eccentricity'.

Reed is quite good though!

[gair.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that Abigail one sounds good - I'll check it out.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I do really recommend it. It's still YA, so it's not all that nuanced, but I like Rachel Vail's writing anyway. Wonder's another good one about changing friendships and bullying.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Give my love to the children's bookshop in Edinburgh. (Literally the shop, not the person in it as she doesn't know me and would probably be unnerved.) I love that shop, but it makes me wish I was rich.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I don't like it so much as other bookshops - too neat, so it doesn't feel like you could find something great at any point. But then I am biased!