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Wednesday Book Catch-Up
Sep. 20th, 2023 09:34 amAnother Wednesday Book Catch-Up! I’m taking a little pause in my trip to recover from this cold, but hopefully by Friday I will be up and at ‘em again.
On my camping trip, I read W. E. Johns’ Worrals Goes Afoot, which is the last Worrals book I had not read - the end of an era! And not a bad book to go out on, although of the later books my favorite remains Worrals in the Wastelands, in which Worrals hunts a Nazi war criminal in the wilds of Canada.
Worrals Goes Afoot is set in the Middle East. As you might guess from the title, there’s jolly little airplane action. Worrals and Frecks are trying to find the arms dealers who are stirring up trouble near a road that the British are building across the territory, and end up in a load of trouble when someone cottons on that they’re working for the police just a little too soon! There is a trademark Johns moment when Frecks looks up at the stars and realizes the smallness of all human affairs, which is perhaps comforting when one is running for one’s life across the desert.
I also read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Changeling, about a babe of the Little Dark People who was left in exchange for a babe of the Epidii, and then raised among the Epidii until difficulties strike the clan. (The idea being, I think, that such exchanges are the origin of the later changeling myths involving fairy folk.) This is very short, very Sutcliff; “Take a wolf-cub young enough from his own kind, and rear him with the dog pack, and he will run with the dog-pack, and hunt wolf when he is grown…” I have without quite meaning to become a Sutcliff completist, and it’s nice to add another book to my tally.
Also Gentlemen from England, which Maud Hart Lovelace wrote with her husband Delos: apparently, she did the research and he did the plotting. It’s a historical fiction novel, set during a curious episode in Minnesota history: in the early 1870s, a promoter sold land to the younger sons of English, who gushed into the territory and hired laborers at high prices to work their land while they put on their pinks and went fox-hunting.
This is a delightful time and place to set a novel, and this one is thoroughly researched and charming. My favorite subplot is that of Lady Meta, an English-Bavarian noblewoman dragged here by her husband after he was cashiered from the army by cheating at cards; she has a not-quite-affair with her neighbor Richard, which keeps him from his destined love for most of the novel (gotta keep those lovers apart somehow, or how do you have your happy ending!). Usually the character who fulfills this Other Woman role would be a villainess, but the novel is sympathetic to Lady Meta: Richard is her closest neighbor on the lonely prairie and her only ally against her erratic husband, and it’s understandable that she clings to him till she finds another way to protect herself.
It’s a pleasant book, but it doesn’t have that effortlessly readable quality that makes the Betsy-Tacy books such classics. I think Lovelace simply found her perfect subject in Betsy-Tacy: it allowed her to indulge her passion for research (she loved to look up names of popular songs etc. to make sure she had them in the exact right year) and infused it with the golden glow of her own memories of childhood.
On my camping trip, I read W. E. Johns’ Worrals Goes Afoot, which is the last Worrals book I had not read - the end of an era! And not a bad book to go out on, although of the later books my favorite remains Worrals in the Wastelands, in which Worrals hunts a Nazi war criminal in the wilds of Canada.
Worrals Goes Afoot is set in the Middle East. As you might guess from the title, there’s jolly little airplane action. Worrals and Frecks are trying to find the arms dealers who are stirring up trouble near a road that the British are building across the territory, and end up in a load of trouble when someone cottons on that they’re working for the police just a little too soon! There is a trademark Johns moment when Frecks looks up at the stars and realizes the smallness of all human affairs, which is perhaps comforting when one is running for one’s life across the desert.
I also read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Changeling, about a babe of the Little Dark People who was left in exchange for a babe of the Epidii, and then raised among the Epidii until difficulties strike the clan. (The idea being, I think, that such exchanges are the origin of the later changeling myths involving fairy folk.) This is very short, very Sutcliff; “Take a wolf-cub young enough from his own kind, and rear him with the dog pack, and he will run with the dog-pack, and hunt wolf when he is grown…” I have without quite meaning to become a Sutcliff completist, and it’s nice to add another book to my tally.
Also Gentlemen from England, which Maud Hart Lovelace wrote with her husband Delos: apparently, she did the research and he did the plotting. It’s a historical fiction novel, set during a curious episode in Minnesota history: in the early 1870s, a promoter sold land to the younger sons of English, who gushed into the territory and hired laborers at high prices to work their land while they put on their pinks and went fox-hunting.
This is a delightful time and place to set a novel, and this one is thoroughly researched and charming. My favorite subplot is that of Lady Meta, an English-Bavarian noblewoman dragged here by her husband after he was cashiered from the army by cheating at cards; she has a not-quite-affair with her neighbor Richard, which keeps him from his destined love for most of the novel (gotta keep those lovers apart somehow, or how do you have your happy ending!). Usually the character who fulfills this Other Woman role would be a villainess, but the novel is sympathetic to Lady Meta: Richard is her closest neighbor on the lonely prairie and her only ally against her erratic husband, and it’s understandable that she clings to him till she finds another way to protect herself.
It’s a pleasant book, but it doesn’t have that effortlessly readable quality that makes the Betsy-Tacy books such classics. I think Lovelace simply found her perfect subject in Betsy-Tacy: it allowed her to indulge her passion for research (she loved to look up names of popular songs etc. to make sure she had them in the exact right year) and infused it with the golden glow of her own memories of childhood.
