A Certain Slant of Light

21. Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you dislike or even loathe.)

This question is surprisingly hard! It also seems likely to collect contention (“What do you MEAN you don’t like my precious woobie baby who has never done anything wrong in his LIFE?”) so I think I will skip it.


22. Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

I’ve always thought that Ivy Carson from Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling would be the most amazing friend, but tbh I’ve found the closest possible thing in asakiyume. It’s too bad you live across the country, but then, Martha and Ivy were often separated too.

Betsy Ray from the Betsy-Tacy books might also be a great friend, although she does tend to like to be the one who makes up the stories, so probably I should plume for Tacy, who is happy to fill the admiring audience role.

Or Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle. She’s so smart and funny and lively, and she lives in an actual castle (so what if it’s falling down, I could camp in a castle for a week on account of it’s a castle), and also she’s so isolated that she really needs a friend, so I would be useful to her, especially when she needs help forgetting Simon. We could talk about books and ramble through the countryside and write a ludicrously melodramatic novel together.

In 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.

This weekend I’ve been criss-crossing southern Illinois, which actually is what Indiana is reputed to be: a flat wasteland of corn and McDonalds, without so much as a single Starbucks to soften the drive. No hills or trees either—not even any cows. But there was a river called Kaskaskia, which did brighten things up marginally.

When I wasn’t driving I read I Capture the Castle, which I enjoyed. It’s sprightly and bright and the prose runs like water; the narrator, Cassandra, has a bright and distinctive voice, well-educated and original but not out of keeping for a seventeen-year-old. The descriptions are beautiful, the pacing excellent, and the characters well-drawn.

One caveat: ( Spoilers )

I really did enjoy the book, despite having spent three paragraphs flagellating it. I want to live in Cassandra’s castle—a really castle!—I wish there had been a blueprint for it in the book.