osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2023-06-28 07:46 am
osprey_archer) wrote2023-06-28 07:46 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Jean Slaughter Doty’s Can I Get There By Candlelight?, a horse girl book mashed together with a magical time travel book, which I adored. One day when Gail is out riding her horse Candy, she finds a gate leading to a cool shadowy path through the woods. At the other end of the path, Gail meets Hilary, a girl her own age who is wearing an old-fashioned white frock and eating tea cakes in the summerhouse outside a mansion! Gail and Hilary quickly become best friends, meeting almost every afternoon all summer to take turns riding Candy, even as Gail feels a growing unease about the oddity of the whole situation.
This book heads directly for the gooey center of its premise: the bond between girl and horse, the mysterious pathway through the woods, the instant best-friendship. If that appeals to you, you’ll probably love it as much as I did. If it doesn’t, there is not a lot else here, as Doty doesn’t get side-tracked by subplots or side characters.
My only complaint is that the book ended too abruptly. Partly this is just that I didn’t want it to be over! But also the last time we saw Hilary, she had just crashed a pony cart, and looked like she might be dead! I would have liked just a little resolution of this storyline: Gail tracks down an article about the accident in an old newspaper and finds out that Hilary lived, or something like that.
Elizabeth Enright’s Tatsinda is a brief, sprightly fairy tale. A magical mountain is entirely populated by people with ice-white hair and blue eyes… except Tatsinda, a golden-haired, brown-eyed girl who was dropped on the mountain by an eagle when she was a baby. The other mountain folk think Tatsinda is a wonderful weaver, but strange-looking and ugly… until the prince confesses his love of Tatsinda, and everyone realizes that different doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Happy end! It’s cute, but it feels shallower than the Melendy books.
I’ve loved Doris Gates’s Blue Willow ever since I read it as a child, so I had high hopes for Gates’s Sensible Kate, but alas I didn’t like it nearly as much. Maybe if I had read it as a child? But also maybe not. I felt that it was just a little too thick with life lessons, and needed more story to string them together.
What I’m Reading Now
Almost done with Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche! Sorry in advance that the journey has to end. The chapters are so perfectly bite-size, and they always make me hungry. This morning I read one about homemade pasta...
What I Plan to Read Next
I just learned that Elizabeth Wein has a new book out! It’s called Stateless and it’s a murder mystery set during a pre-World War II air race and I have it on hold at the library.
Jean Slaughter Doty’s Can I Get There By Candlelight?, a horse girl book mashed together with a magical time travel book, which I adored. One day when Gail is out riding her horse Candy, she finds a gate leading to a cool shadowy path through the woods. At the other end of the path, Gail meets Hilary, a girl her own age who is wearing an old-fashioned white frock and eating tea cakes in the summerhouse outside a mansion! Gail and Hilary quickly become best friends, meeting almost every afternoon all summer to take turns riding Candy, even as Gail feels a growing unease about the oddity of the whole situation.
This book heads directly for the gooey center of its premise: the bond between girl and horse, the mysterious pathway through the woods, the instant best-friendship. If that appeals to you, you’ll probably love it as much as I did. If it doesn’t, there is not a lot else here, as Doty doesn’t get side-tracked by subplots or side characters.
My only complaint is that the book ended too abruptly. Partly this is just that I didn’t want it to be over! But also the last time we saw Hilary, she had just crashed a pony cart, and looked like she might be dead! I would have liked just a little resolution of this storyline: Gail tracks down an article about the accident in an old newspaper and finds out that Hilary lived, or something like that.
Elizabeth Enright’s Tatsinda is a brief, sprightly fairy tale. A magical mountain is entirely populated by people with ice-white hair and blue eyes… except Tatsinda, a golden-haired, brown-eyed girl who was dropped on the mountain by an eagle when she was a baby. The other mountain folk think Tatsinda is a wonderful weaver, but strange-looking and ugly… until the prince confesses his love of Tatsinda, and everyone realizes that different doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Happy end! It’s cute, but it feels shallower than the Melendy books.
I’ve loved Doris Gates’s Blue Willow ever since I read it as a child, so I had high hopes for Gates’s Sensible Kate, but alas I didn’t like it nearly as much. Maybe if I had read it as a child? But also maybe not. I felt that it was just a little too thick with life lessons, and needed more story to string them together.
What I’m Reading Now
Almost done with Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche! Sorry in advance that the journey has to end. The chapters are so perfectly bite-size, and they always make me hungry. This morning I read one about homemade pasta...
What I Plan to Read Next
I just learned that Elizabeth Wein has a new book out! It’s called Stateless and it’s a murder mystery set during a pre-World War II air race and I have it on hold at the library.
no subject
Excuse me, I need to go to a bookshop and/or library right now :-D
no subject
no subject
no subject
I know there are a bunch of these time travel books where a present-day child meets a past child. Are there any books from the point of view of the past child getting visits that from their point of view come from the future?
no subject
I think I recall rejecting Tatsinda with an eyeroll. Even as a kid I think I felt beyond stories where the lesson learned is that different isn't necessarily bad. I suspect also I was fed up at the notion of the poor blond-haired girl being considered ugly. It's such a clear way of showing how much the author (and society) actually *value* that look. Oh childre! What if a simply **delightful** blond-haired girl was dropped into a town where the people thought she was ugly?????
no subject
Tatsinda reminded me of The Gammage Cup - the thinly-sketched fantasy world, the message that being different isn't bad, but also the bad guys are very visibly different... I mean in both cases the bad guys are in fact doing bad things, so it's not just that they're weird-looking, but. They are weird-looking!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject