A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up Vivien Alcock’s The Cuckoo Sister intending to read a chapter or two, and then ended up mainlining the whole book. Before Kate was born, her older sister Emma was kidnapped from her pram. When Kate is eleven years old, a girl shows up at the door with a note saying that she’s Emma… but is she?

The focus of the book is not so much on the “is she or isn’t she?” detective work (it’s 1985, so they can’t get a DNA test, but they could at least get a blood test), but on the emotional impact primarily on Kate and Emma, who was raised as a Rosie and had no idea she might be the kidnapped Emma until Kate’s parents let her read the note she had unwittingly delivered. Totally absorbing. A fast read, highly recommended.

I also intended to take my time with D. E. Stevenson’s Young Mrs. Savage, in which a young widow and her four children return to the Scottish seaside town where she grew up, but instead I ended up taking it down in two gulps. One thing I really like about Stevenson’s work is that her children are always people: you never think she’s saying “How do six-year-olds act?”, as if six-year-olds were interchangeable, but “How would Mark and Nigel react to this circumstance?”

You would imagine that more authors could do this, as every author was at one point a child, but in fact this seems to be surprisingly difficult.

I also read Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a memoir/novel about an Englishwoman married to a Prussian count who finds happiness through reviving the garden on his estate. Gorgeous garden descriptions, almost quit in the middle because I was so fed up with the narrator’s smug sense of superiority to just about everyone: peasants of course, Germans in general, people who want to live in towns and don’t think the idea of being snowed in all winter sounds just lovely. Persevered, glad I finished it, doubtful if I’ll seek out any of von Arnim’s other work even though I loved The Enchanted April, as I suspect now I’ll see traces of that selfsame smugness in it all.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished Among the Shadows, so I’ve swung back around to A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, which actually I think is more effectively spooky anyway. There’s just something eerie about the sea.

What I Plan to Read Next

Procrastinating on Interview with the Vampire, because I’m pretty sure that when I read it, it’s going to become my entire personality for about a month. Will that be because I love it or because I hate it? Well, it could go either way.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

John Scalzi’s Starter Villain, a romp as Scalzi’s books generally are. This one has sentient cat spies and foul-mouthed unionizing dolphins and a protagonist who inherits a supervillain lair in a literal volcano, and it’s a great mixture of fun supervillain ~aesthetic (all the villains bring a cat to the grand supervillain conference on Lake Como) and the more mundane realities of running any large organization. Like, you know, the unionizing dolphins.

I also very much enjoyed Vivien Alcock’s Ghostly Companions: A Feast of Chilling Tales, although it has a most misleading subtitle. With one or two exceptions (one of which continues to haunt me… the character deserved her fate, but does anyone really deserve that fate?), the tales are not chilling. They are stories of ghosts who need to be seen and acknowledged and, sometimes, loved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door, a collection of variously creepy tales, some supernatural and some not. So far, the most crushing is the story about a woman who has been the caretaker of a Roman mosaic for decades. She loves the mosaic, it gives her life structure and meaning, and when she learns that it’s going to be taken over by a predecessor of English Heritage, she hammers it to pieces.

What I Plan to Read Next

Waffling about whether to read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Has anyone read it? What do you think?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

One more Newbery Honor book: Elizabeth Janet Gray’s Young Walter Scott, a novelized biography of the youth of Sir Walter Scott. Fascinating to get a glimpse of life in Edinburgh in the last decades of the 18th century - the ‘45 still cast a long shadow!

Also Vivien Alcock’s Stranger at the Window, which I would have LOVED if I had read it as a child, as it’s a book about a hidden child and I LOVED books about hidden children. (Why yes, I did obsess over Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, in which families are required by law to stop at two children so third children have to be kept hidden. The rest of the series never lived up to the first book, IMO.)

In this book, young Leslie realizes that there is a child hiding in the attic of the house next door in London. Soon, she realizes that the neighbor children are hiding an illegal immigrant… whom they can no longer hide, as their mother has become suspicious, so Leslie has to hide him! Wonderful. A++. You know how in the sixth book of the Samantha series, Samantha hides her best friend Nellie and her two little sisters in the attic? This pushes all those buttons.

Given the premise, you might expect Stranger at the Window to delve into the whys and wherefores of illegal immigration more than it does. But goddammit, I’m not here to learn anything, I’m here for adventure.

Also Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Pink Motel. Just before Christmas, the Mellen family inherits a bright pink motel in Florida from Great-Uncle Hiram. They head down to put the place in order and sell it, only the children are instantly smitten and want to stay there forever on account of the quirky guests: an itinerant handyman who carved weather vanes for all the cottages at the motel, a gangster who cuts paper lace, and an artist from Greenwich Village who carries a possibly magical hamper (always full of whatever food you happen to need, including on one occasion Alligator Food).

Is Miss Ferris in fact magical? The book never commits to an answer on this question, but (a) that magical hamper, (b) she keeps saying things like “[shooting apples off people’s heads] is a nice trick that originated in Switzerland, I believe, a long time ago when I was just a girl,” and (c) she spins and weaves an entire theater curtain in less than a week.

The book sort of sits at the intersection of mid-century children’s fantasy and mid-century children’s books about family hijinks, so if you like either of those things you might like it. Carol Ryrie Brink is always a good time, in any case. (I bought this book cheap at a used bookstore and if anyone would like it, I would be happy to send it.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. Having returned young Anne-Hilarion to his grandfather in London, the Chevalier de la Vireville has landed once again on the coast of Brittany… only to realize that his foot is more badly injured than he realized, and he may not be able to climb the rocky cliffs off the beach!

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has another autobiography by another mid-century woman children’s writer that I like (Carol Ryrie Brink). I’ve learned my lesson from the debacle after I put a hold on L. M. Boston’s autobiography last week: I’m going to Central Library in person to pick Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands up myself in my hot little hands!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I zoomed through Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, in part because there were a hundred odd people on the hold list for it at the library, but also because it all just flowed so wonderfully that I just kept reading it. I’m not quite sure why, because it’s not exactly what you’d call plotty; in the first half of the book there’s sort of a mystery about what exactly put Maeve and Danny at such odds with their stepmother, but the book doesn’t lean on it for suspense.

It’s also less about the house than you might expect from the title (I must admit that I had some hopes for gothic elements, but that’s not really present); what it is about is about family and family history, and the way that the past shapes the present - and the things that we believe about the past just as much as the past itself.

I also read Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s The Cobbler’s Boy, a novella about young Kit Marlowe, which I enjoyed, but not as much as I expected to. Perhaps I let it languish on my TBR list for a little too long: I should have struck while the iron was hot.

What I’m Reading Now

I have begun Vivien Alcock’s Singer to the Sea God, which kicks off with Perseus walking into the king’s court with Medusa’s head and turning everyone there into stone… including our hero’s sister Cleo. Now our hero has escaped the island, statue of Cleo in tow, and I can only presume he’s going to get kidnapped by Poseidon??? Or so the title suggests.

This is utterly unlike the other two Vivien Alcock books that I’ve read (which were utterly unlike each other) and I’m kind of digging her determination to follow her bliss and write whatever the hell she wants.

I’ve also continued on with William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance. Bartley and Marcia have eloped and moved to Boston! (asakiyume, every time they mention a landmark that we saw - and this happens more often than you might think from a novel published in the 1870s - I get so excited. “I’ve been there!”) Marcia is wracked by jealousy every time that Bartley talks to another woman for too long, right now without reason, but he gave her reason before their marriage and I strongly suspect that Bartley’s going to give her a reason again sooner or later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I got Jennifer A. Jordan’s Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes & Other Forgotten Foods from the library, so I’ll probably read that soon, although it must be admitted that I currently have MANY books out from the library because the library is switching over computer systems this month and what if I ran out of books while the system was unavailable???

...I have an entire shelf of unread books that I actually own, so I would have been fine, but nonetheless I checked out a lot. So we’ll see what I read first.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden would make a delightful anime. Our heroine, Frankie Stein (the name is an unsubtle hint at the books theme), gets a bit of primordial goo from her brother, which gets struck by lightning and begins to grow into a… well, a monster: that’s Frankie’s first reaction. It’s a strange, blob-like, gelid, red-eyed creature that grows at an alarmingly rapid rate.

And yet Frankie comes to love it, and see it as lovable and cute in its very strangeness, and there are a bunch of adorable scenes where she learns how to read its body language (when it’s happy, it sometimes forms its mouth into a figure eight, for instance) and watches it explore its environment. The book is in fact an answer to Frankenstein: “What would have happened if Frankenstein loved his monster?”

I also finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which really hits its stride in its final chapter, when Gates offers his interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt to push back against white supremacy through art and go some way to undoing the Redemption, in which white supremacists “redeemed” the South from Reconstruction by reinstituting white supremacy policies.

“Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture… There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”

I suspect there’s a general human tendency (God knows you can see it in some of the sillier revolutionary pretensions of fandom) to believe that whatever we personally happen to be involved in is not merely important, but the most important thing there is. Gates’ summing up is a useful corrective to this tendency: “While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”

After watching Downton Abbey, I felt such enthusiasm that I snagged Jessica Fellowes’ murder mystery, The Mitford Murders, from the library. (Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes, who created Downton Abbey.) Unfortunately, I found it rather a disappointment: most of the Mitfords are still children for most of the book and don’t seem to have grown into their personalities yet (mind, I don’t know a great deal about the Mitfords, but I know enough to know that they should all have personalities rather than just being an indistinguishable mass of children), and the mystery plot relies on too many coincidences. Won’t be continuing the series.

What I’m Reading Now

I could easily have finished William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions, but I’ve actually slowed down reading it because I don’t want it to be over yet. Not only am I enjoying spending time with Howells, but his literary reminiscences have added a number of books to my Gutenberg list, too. Of course many of the books he talks about are classics that I was already aware of (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens), but he also waxes lyrical about a few nineteenth century authors who are no longer widely read. I’m looking forward to trying out Ik Marvel’s Dream Life.

I’ve also been reading Paul Watkins’ Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England. Paul Watkins is the real name of Sam Eastland, author of the Inspector Pekkala books, and I am beginning to suspect that Watkins felt drawn to Stalinist Russia because its arbitrarily punitive atmosphere reminded him of the days of his youth in an English boarding school.

What I Plan to Read Next

Has anyone read Alys Clare’s The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully at the library, but on the other hand I’m not sure I need another Victorian mystery series. The setting might invite unfair comparison to The Most Comfortable Man in London, a.k.a. the Charles Lenox mysteries.