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Wednesday Reading Meme In London
Aug. 6th, 2014 02:50 pmIn London! Exhausted! Probably should not have used my precious sleeping hours on the plane watching Frozen, but...Frozen. And I had a pain au chocolat for snack today! They really are so much better than England; this one was still warm and light and rich.
Oh, and! Wednesday reading meme. (I am not writing all this in my current state of brain-deadness. I wrote much of it earlier.)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Dodie Smith’s The Town in Bloom, which has a rather neat nesting structure: it begins and ends with Mouse and her friends meeting decades after their first summer together, with that summer sandwiched in between. The prose is charming (although it doesn’t have the same verve and dash as Smith’s most famous novel, I Capture the Castle), but the structure tends to place the emphasis of the story on disappointment: the characters have not led miserable lives, precisely, but it is clear that this summer was the high point of their existence.
What I’m Reading Now
Also Maurice Thompson’s Alice of Old Vincennes, a historical romance set in my home state of Indiana, and you have no idea how exciting it is to see places that I know transformed into the setting for swashbuckling derring-do! The British have taken over the fort in Vincennes. The local French (of whom Alice is one. Sort of) don't much like it. The Americans follow George Rogers Clark on a dramatic and water-logged trek to cast the British out!
Alice is one of those improbably white and Protestant heroines who populate turn of the twentieth century fiction. She was raised by Indians until she was twelve - but by a Protestant Indian woman, and she still knows the Lord’s Prayer (in English, no less!) word perfect - then taken in by a French Creole trader. But really she’s the daughter of blue-blooded Virginians, and we know this because she has a locket with the family crest and also an unusual birthmark on her shoulder to prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. She has all the exciting accoutrements of exoticism without actually being foreign!
But in this case it is apparently based on historical fact - the locket thing, at least - so well played, Maurice Thompson. Well played.
And she has swashed a lot of buckles! So far, she has fenced with her American soon-to-be fiance (who she beat the first time round, but of course he learned to beat her later, because late nineteenth century romances operate on an Atalanta principle), shot a British soldier (who fell in love with her thereafter), stabbed another British soldier who invaded her house to arrest her father, got arrested for being so darn stabbity, escaped from captivity when Commander Hamilton came to her cell for possibly nefarious purposes, and is now waving the American flag over the commander's head to rub it in that he lost the fort to the Americans. And lost her. And lost everything. Eat that, Commander Hamilton!
What I Plan to Read Next
I plan to be extremely busy and not have much time for reading, honestly. But! I am v. excited about The Firefly of France, which appears to be a swashbuckling spy thriller romance set during World War I (and written e'en as the war continued), so that will probably be next when I get around to it.
Oh, and! Wednesday reading meme. (I am not writing all this in my current state of brain-deadness. I wrote much of it earlier.)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Dodie Smith’s The Town in Bloom, which has a rather neat nesting structure: it begins and ends with Mouse and her friends meeting decades after their first summer together, with that summer sandwiched in between. The prose is charming (although it doesn’t have the same verve and dash as Smith’s most famous novel, I Capture the Castle), but the structure tends to place the emphasis of the story on disappointment: the characters have not led miserable lives, precisely, but it is clear that this summer was the high point of their existence.
What I’m Reading Now
Also Maurice Thompson’s Alice of Old Vincennes, a historical romance set in my home state of Indiana, and you have no idea how exciting it is to see places that I know transformed into the setting for swashbuckling derring-do! The British have taken over the fort in Vincennes. The local French (of whom Alice is one. Sort of) don't much like it. The Americans follow George Rogers Clark on a dramatic and water-logged trek to cast the British out!
Alice is one of those improbably white and Protestant heroines who populate turn of the twentieth century fiction. She was raised by Indians until she was twelve - but by a Protestant Indian woman, and she still knows the Lord’s Prayer (in English, no less!) word perfect - then taken in by a French Creole trader. But really she’s the daughter of blue-blooded Virginians, and we know this because she has a locket with the family crest and also an unusual birthmark on her shoulder to prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. She has all the exciting accoutrements of exoticism without actually being foreign!
But in this case it is apparently based on historical fact - the locket thing, at least - so well played, Maurice Thompson. Well played.
And she has swashed a lot of buckles! So far, she has fenced with her American soon-to-be fiance (who she beat the first time round, but of course he learned to beat her later, because late nineteenth century romances operate on an Atalanta principle), shot a British soldier (who fell in love with her thereafter), stabbed another British soldier who invaded her house to arrest her father, got arrested for being so darn stabbity, escaped from captivity when Commander Hamilton came to her cell for possibly nefarious purposes, and is now waving the American flag over the commander's head to rub it in that he lost the fort to the Americans. And lost her. And lost everything. Eat that, Commander Hamilton!
What I Plan to Read Next
I plan to be extremely busy and not have much time for reading, honestly. But! I am v. excited about The Firefly of France, which appears to be a swashbuckling spy thriller romance set during World War I (and written e'en as the war continued), so that will probably be next when I get around to it.
