slemslempike | September books

Bilgewater - Jane Gardam
Watching the Roses - Adele Geras
Pictures of the Night - Adele Geras
City of Bells - Elizabeth Goudge
Henrietta's House - Elizabeth Goudge
A Wanted Man - Lee Child
Rebecca's Rules - Anna Carey
Changing Times - Tim Kennemore
Jethro's Mill - Susan Pleydell
The High Cost of Living - Marge Piercy
The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge - Josephine Elder
The Young Visiters - Daisy Ashford

The girl in Bilgewater lives at a boys' school with her father, though she attends the local school rather than being a pupil. Marigold is awkward with everyone, but develops some friendships with some of the boys and with the Headmaster's daughter. She climbs out of a window to escape a weekend away and ends up in charge of an Oxbridge college.

Watching the Roses and Pictures of the Night are sequels to The Tower Room, which is much more of a school story than these. They are all retellings of fairy stories. Watching the Roses is Sleeping Beauty. Alice is raped at her 18th birthday party and can't get out of bed or deal with it at all. Most of the book is told through her memories of life leading up to the party, and at the end her friends come and she starts to recover. Pictures of the Night is Snow White, with Bella's evil stepmother possibly trying to kill her as she sings her way around Paris in a band.

I have had City of Bells on my shelves for years and finally got around to reading it. It's lovely. I love that the village basically coerces Jocelyn into opening a bookshop for them. I then read Henrietta's House, which is a sort of sequel. I think I've read it before, but a long long time ago, and it doesn't quite match my memories of it. I remember the house being even more mysterious and basically trapping people there out of time.

A Wanted Man - oh, Reacher! Actually, I found this a little too smooth. I like Reacher to have a few more set-backs along the way, and also this constant moving towards the woman's voice across the country seems like it's leading to an End. Hmm. What I really want is Reacher in military training. I love military training stories.

Rebecca's Rules is an ace sequel to The Real Rebecca. The band isn't really together any more, but instead they join the school musical, and have to deal with their dreadful schoolmate's aspirations to be a reality TV star. I like Rebecca a lot, it's easy to cringe at her teenagerness without losing affection for her. It feels quite stylistically similar to Louise Rennison in a lot of places, but without the casual homophobia, which is nice.

[Unknown site tag] mentioned Changing Times in the comments to my last post about a Tim Kennemore, and I realised that this was one I didn't have at all, and possibly hadn't even read! Always a brilliant feeling to find that there is an unread book from a favourite author. This is much more like The Fortunate Few in terms of the rather unsympathetic and hard-hearted main character, with none of the family and friendship warmth that's so good in Wall of Words and The Middle of the Sandwich.

Jethro's Mill is another borrowed Susan Pleydell, which I enjoyed less than the others. A family inherit a Mill, and must battle the local na'erdowells and the evil non-local developers in order to save the local cricket ground.

I have read The High Cost of Living before and really thought it was great, but I didn't remember that until about halfway through, so it is somehow great without being memorable.

I like Josephine Elder very much, but she can be rather depressing. In The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge Monica tries to take up someone else who doesn't know how to behave, and cuts herself off from her actual friends in doing so. It was fascinating to read about the particular idiosyncracies of the college like girls "propping" one another (using first names). (Though my buddy the other day was talking about her "academic husband" and asked if we didn't do academic families, and I found that and all other modern day remnants so much less okay.)

I had idly skimmed The Young Visiters when I worked in a bookshop and not been much impressed. Then this copy showed up on the work booksale table with illustrations by Posy Simmonds, so I took it and read it on a bus. It is rather charming! I love the clearly half-heard and half-understood phrase about being the wrong side of the blanket, and how one behaves at a country Friday to Monday.