Top Ten Tuesday: Forgotten Classics

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Today's theme is Ten Hidden Gem Books in X Genre. I've decided go for classics, so I'm listing ten older books that have been mostly forgotten or that I think should be better known:

A Cathedral Courtship by Kate Douglas Wiggin

A sweet romantic tale combined with a tour of English cathedrals

The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Mary Yonge

A tragic Victorian bestseller

White Boots by Noel Streatfeild

A story about family, friendship, and ice skating

The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit

Six children determine to restore their family's fortunes - but things don't really go according to plan

Seven Sisters at Queen Anne's by Evelyn Smith

Seven sisters go off to school for the first time,

Half Magic by Edward Eager

A magic coin that only grants half of what you wish for - what could possibly go wrong?

Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery

I've reviewed this recently here.

Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

An entertaining novel about the young Elizabeth I

The Silent Shore by Ruth Elwin Harris

The first in a series about four sisters set during and after World War I

The Girls of St. Wode's by L.T. Meade

A story about six girls at college in the late 1800s

Footnotes: August 2017

Today I'm excited to be joining in with Footnotes, a new link-up created by Emily and Ashley. This involves posting about a quote each month, based on a prompt they supply. As an avid collector of quotes this sounds like a great idea to me! This month's prompt is a quote from an author. Although there are of course many quotes I could supply, I've gone with the first to spring to my mind, which I like a lot and is from one of my favourite books, Anne of Green Gables:

 

 

This is a quote that always makes me happy; it's a reminder that you don't need lots of money or possessions, that there are more important things like friendship, happiness, and imagination. I love Anne's way of putting it, and I love the description of the sea, too, "all silver and shallow and visions of things not seen"; it does describe very well what it looks like in the evening.

There, I don't think my explanation has really done justice at all, and there are so many other good quotes that I could have chosen to share. However, they will have to wait for future months!

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Top Ten Tuesday: Mystery Recommendations

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Today's theme is Ten Book Recommendations for ______. Since I've been reading a lot of mystery/detective books lately, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of mystery recommendations. Then I realised I already made a similar list last September ... however, I've read quite a few new ones since then and I think this list is different enough for it to be worthwhile. So, here are ten books I recommend to people who like mysteries (especially of the classic or historical variety.

A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson (mini review)

This is one I've read recently. Set in a small town in 1950s England, featuring a mysterious death which occurred seven years earlier.

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

This is the second in Ellis Peters' Cadfael series, and one of the best that I've read so far, although I'd recommend the series as a whole.

Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens

The second in Robin Stevens' series featuring schoolgirl detectives in 1930s England. I enjoyed this a lot more than the first book in the series and it can be read as a standalone. The characterisation in this book is really well done, and probably stands out more than the mystery (which is also good, but not spectacular).

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (review)

The first in Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series, which I've been slowly enjoying my way through. This is one of the shorter books in the series (some are quite long) so it's definitely a good place to start, though for the most part it isn't necessary to read the books in order.

A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

Shockingly, this is the only Agatha Christie book I've read to date (I really need to get on that!). It was very good though. Do I need to say any more?

The Draycott Murder Mystery by Molly Thynne

A lesser-known murder mystery from the 1920s, which has recently been republished by Dean Street Press. This was a good mystery and despite it being a standalone novel rather than a series, I found that the characters were very compelling too.

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

Set in a women's college in 1930s Oxford; in fact it was published the same year as Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, with the same setting. This is a much more lighthearted book though, with a fair bit of humour as well as good characters and a strong mystery aspect.

The Good Knight by Sarah Woodbury

The first in a mystery series set in medieval Wales. This was a Kindle freebie and I didn't really know what to expect, but I enjoyed it a surprising amount, despite some flaws.

The Matters at Mansfield by Carrie Bebris

Set several years on from Pride & Prejudice, Darcy and Elizabeth have taken up mystery-solving as a hobby. This is actually one of the better Jane Austen sequels I've read, the dialogue felt reasonably authentic (at least it's not jarringly modern) and the mystery is a good story in its own right. This book also features characters from Mansfield Park.

The Thieves of Ostia by Caroline Lawrence

Featuring four young detectives in Ancient Rome, this is the first in a series of seventeen books (which was one of my favourite series in years gone by). It now has a spin-off series, The Roman Quests, which is very good. (Possibly even better than the original series.)

Mini-Reviews #5: The Selchester Mysteries

I've recently enjoyed three books from the Selchester Mysteries series by Elizabeth Edmondson, so I thought I'd combine my reviews into one post. These are a series of mysteries set in 1950s England, featuring a castle, a cast of eccentric characters, a few puzzling murders, and some Cold War intrigue. I found them very enjoyable.

  

 

A Man of Some Repute

 

This was a good book, although not outstanding. The mystery aspect was very intriguing, and well done, and there was at least one twist that took me by surprise. The writing was good enough; there were no bits that stood out particularly, but it wasn't bad.

It took me a while to get invested in the characters; I think because the author had two many points of view, and would often move slightly away from the main characters to have a little bit from the viewpoint of another, more minor character. I guess this was partly to show how characters were seen by other people, but I wish she had stuck to just Hugo and Freya, so that we could get to know them quicker. However, by the end of the story I realised that I actually had become quite attached to the characters and location, and wanted more! This was probably just as well, as the story ends on rather a cliffhanger (although the main mystery is resolved, it's clear that there's a lot more to find out).

 

A Youthful Indiscretion

 

This was a quick read, only 60 pages long. I enjoyed it, although it definitely felt like it was just a bridge between two books rather than a story in its own right. It follows on from the cliffhanger at the end of A Man of Some Repute, but also introduces several new plot elements, such as a new colleague for Hugo, that are seemingly unrelated to this and not really developed in this book. Presumably they will be important later.

The ending was not very satisfying; the main plot thread is only partially resolved, and there are still many questions to be answered.

A Question of Inheritance

 

This book carries on pretty much where the last one left off. It takes a pretty long time to get to the main mystery, with lots of details of the characters' lives, and events which later turn out to be important. I found it harder to keep track of the plot in this book; I'm not sure if this is because it was more complex or just because there are a number of things which don't seem very important at the time but become significant later, and I wasn't paying enough attention to remember them. However, I still enjoyed the book a lot. Fortunately, this one doesn't end on a cliffhanger, although there are still some (rather important) loose ends that need tying up. The next book in the series will presumably do that.

 

Sadly, the author died before finishing the next book in the series, A Matter of Loyalty, but it has been completed by her son and is being released in October. This is the last one, so hopefully it will clear up all the remaining plotlines. I'm hoping it will be just as good as the previous books in the series, although I'll be sad to leave these characters behind.

Both A Man of Some Repute and A Question of Inheritance are currently 99p on Kindle (at time of posting), so if you are interested in this series now is probably a good time to look into it :)

Book Review: Jane of Lantern Hill by L. M. Montgomery

 (minor spoilers follow)

Jane and her mother live in Toronto with her grandmother, who loves her mother but bullies Jane. She has always believed that her father is dead, so she is shocked to find that he is in fact alive and living in Prince Edward Island, and  that he wants her to spend the summer with him. Jane goes determined to hate him, but instead she spends a glorious summer keeping house for her father and making friends with the locals. As time passes, both during and after the summer, Jane finds she has much to learn about herself and about life. She also tries to learn about the reasons for her parents' separation, and dreams that perhaps one day they might all be able to live together...

 

I liked Jane. She is perhaps more ordinary than most of Montgomery's heroines; although she is still imaginative, she's not in the same class as Anne or Emily. However, this doesn't stop her from having plenty of good qualities; she is caring, brave, and determined. Although at the start of the story she is rather awkward and lacking in confidence, as the story goes on she learns to become more confident and to stand up for herself more. She also develops a strong understanding of other people; she can see her parents much more clearly than they can see each other. The other characters are also very well-drawn, and realistic. I liked the story too. It's a gentle, character-driven story, which is my favourite kind, really. The writing is lovely and descriptive (of course).

 

There isn't anything that I strongly disliked about it, though there were some parts that I found hard to believe, like how quickly Jane learns to cook and garden, with no prior experience or training. She's supposed to have a natural gift for it, but I don't believe anyone could really learn that quickly, especially at the age of eleven. I also would have liked to spend more time with Jane's friends and neighbours at Lantern Hill; there were quite a lot of them, and there wasn't really time to get to know most of them in the time we spent there. Some of the parts where Jane's grandmother is being particularly awful were a little uncomfortable to read, and I'd really rather be reading about Lantern Hill. But that isn't necessarily a criticism of the story.

 

Two themes stood out to me as I was reading. One is that of jealousy, of selfish love. We are told that Jane's grandmother loves her mother, but it is a selfish love; she can't bear for anyone else, even Jane, to share in her mother's affections. Both of Jane's parents, too, have a tendency to be jealous, to want to be the exclusive focus of each other's attentions. The other theme was that of home. Jane longs for a proper home; she wants to be away from her grandmother, of course, but she also hates the house they live in. When she and her father are looking for a house in Lantern Hill, it has to be just right, to possess a little "magic". The people in the house matter, but the house itself matters too.

 

Overall, I thought this was a very good book, which deserves to be better known. It's a shame Montgomery never finished the sequel, because I would have liked to have spent more time with Jane and her friends.