Books Completed Since December 1

I read only Christmas books during December, so they are all listed in my fall and winter blog "Holiday Harbour."

  Charlie Brown's Christmas Miracle: The Inspiring, Untold Story of the Making of a Holiday Classic, Michael Keane

  A Forest Christmas compiled by Humphrey Phelps

  Dickens' Christmas, compiled by John Hudson

  Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Agatha Christie

  Lovelight Farms, B.K. Borison

  'Twas The Night: The Art and History of the Classic Christmas Poem, written and compiled by Pamela McColl

  Fifty Years of Christmas. edited by Ruth M. Elmquist

Books Completed Since March 1

  To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Joanna Russ
You cannot read books about Star Trek fanfiction without seeing Joanna Russ mentioned: she was a feminist and science-fiction writer who was also a member of the LGBTQIA community. She not only wrote essays about whether science fiction and fantasy are legitimate literature, but ones where feminism and misogyny are addressed. This is a collection of those essays. The few that justify SF&F as lit are interesting, but the meat of the book comes where she begins talking about feminist issues. One essay addresses "feminist" books written by men, in which the ruling class of women turn out to be just as corrupt as men, and end up being "tamed" by the healing power of male sex! Another points a finger at Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog," although she admits the movie is more at fault than the story.

My favorite essay in this book is her essay about the very popular "modern Gothic" novels of the 1970s. I remember these things all over the bookstores, with the pretty heroine always marrying some type of brooding male who was hiding some secret (shades of Mr. Rochester!). It's pointed and humorous at the same time.

 The Belle of Belgrave Square, Mimi Matthews
Julia Wychwood is a heiress with a problem: her sickly parents expect her either to nurse them through their (usually psychosomatic) illnesses or make a good match. Julia, an introvert who prefers her books and horse riding to socializing, hates going to parties, and just wants to be left alone to read. But her parents believe reading novels is "inflaming" her and keep having the doctor bleed her, sometimes until she is totally debilitated.

The "notorious Captain Jasper Blunt," the harsh hero of Waterloo, is in search of a bride, or more appropriately, a bridal dowry that can replenish his Yorkshire estate and provide for his two bastard children. Why would Julia Wychwood not do as a bride? They both love books—in fact, the same author's books—and he agrees that he will let her live her own life (and rescue her from her parents) if she will take care of his children. But her parents have found a more appropriate—older, with better social connections—match for her and they will manipulate her as much as they can. In the meantime Julia and Jasper grow closer, but one of them is harboring a secret.

This is an enjoyable takeoff on Beauty and the Beast with two book lovers from different worlds, but who bond over their love of books. I kind of guessed the secret one of the protagonists was keeping about halfway through the book, but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the story—except I wanted to beat the crap out of Julia's parents, who considered her some hired slavey, just given birth to provide them comfort.

  Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, Anne Boyd Rioux
This book illustrates my problems with e-books. I read this first as an e-book, and dismissed it. Then I picked it up as a remainder book, and enjoyed it a lot more. Rioux first talks about Alcott's history and the reason she wrote the book—her publisher requested "a book for girls." This perplexed Alcott, as she claimed she didn't "know any girls," except for her sisters, so she wrote her story around her family life—and her simple narrative became a hit.

Over the decades, Little Women has remained popular, although its audience has changed: boys, for instance, were also readers of the book in its early days; now it's considered "too girlie." Others believe that with today's mores Little Women, with its themes of traditional femininity, having nothing to say to modern girls, while Rioux refutes this, since both contemporary men and women need to learn lessons of controlling their temper, keeping house, etc. Media versions are also considered, and modern girls' stories as compared to Alcott's classic.

If you're an Alcott fan, and I am, this book will exactly suit.

  Murder at Crossways, Alyssa Maxwell–
In this seventh book in Maxwell's Gilded Newport series, it's the summer of 1898, and Emma Cross, distant relative to the Vanderbilts (the poor side of the family) is working as acting editor-in-chief at her fiance's paper, the Newport Messenger. When she must fill in for the society editor at the wealthy Fishes' Harvest Festival, she, like the rest of the crowd, is awaiting the arrival of the guest of honor, Price Otto of Austria. But he never shows up, and then turns up in the garden, dead, his method of death very close to a man who was found on Bailey's Beach a few days earlier. When Emma investigates the beach death, she is stunned to discover the victim looks familiar—in fact, like her half-brother, but older. Could this be his father?

In the meantime, a series of mishaps at the Messenger convince Emma that someone is trying to sabotage the paper, or at least her editorship of it.

Mamie Fish, the eccentric—and she and her husband are based on the true-life Mamie and Stuyvesant Fish, who really were loving and eccentric as portrayed in the novel—owner of Crossways joins Emma as she investigates both crimes, and she's a definite plus in this story. Oh, and Emma finally has a new horse and poor Barney is finally retired.

  Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, Susan Quinn
You can't read anything about Eleanor Roosevelt without a mention of Lorena Hickok, the brash woman journalist Eleanor met when her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on his original presidential campaign trail. She and "Hick" became best friends—in fact, in reading their letters you might say they were more than just best friends.

Whether you believe or not that the two women also had a physical relationship or that they were platonic lovers, but lovers indeed, they did share intimacies over the course of their friendship that helped the First Lady break away from negative influences. Hick had her own bad habits: she was a chronic workaholic, smoked heavily, and didn't take care of her diabetes, and eventually her possessiveness—since Eleanor eventually had many friends, including those Hick was jealous of—strained their friendship to the breaking point. This is a vivid story of two women, one (Hick) who had to be strong after being thrown out of the house at age fourteen and the other (Eleanor) who was raised "with a silver spoon" that nevertheless came with a bleak childhood and an adult experience that included her husband cheating on her, having a child die, and having to nurse her husband through polio.

Very enjoyable especially if you are an Eleanor Roosevelt aficionado as I am.

  Into the West, Mercedes Lackey
Kordas Valdemar and the people who have followed him to escape the cruelties and the smothering rule of the Empire now take steps to move beyond the lake they emerged from through a magical gate.

This is the next part of the "Founding of Valdemar" saga, and it was a good read, just not as compelling as the first book. A lot of the story is about Kordas' good faith efforts to be a just leader, and his learning to become a good leader as the Valdemarian expedition searches for a permanent place to live without displacing any of the people already there. The mage storms have left their mark, and they are attacked by deadly, unusual creatures who were melded together by weird magic, and come upon a sinister forest that projects malevolence.

While the statecraft bits can make the book drag a little, Delia, Kordas' sister-in-law, undergoes a transformation in this book, from little sister with a serious crush on Kordas to an explorer and much-needed member of the scouting team, her own person.

With a little help from the Hawkbrothers and the hertasi, Kordas and his people find a place to spend the winter. Could this be the place to settle?

Looking forward to the next volume! Have come to love Kordas and his people.

  All That Remains, Sue Black
I bought this because in looking through it discovered Black, a forensic scientist, using her skills to identify dead bodies found at crime scenes. However, this is so much more: the author discusses death itself, the nature of our fears about death, and about working with corpses and how she is thankful for the people who donate their bodies to science so that she can learn about the human body from real remains rather than computer simulations, which she states are poor imitations of learning anatomy from bodies. She even tells a story about a elderly man who is preparing to donate his body to her institution who insists on coming into the anatomy laboratory and watching the students dissect a body so he will know everything that will happen to his corpse—definitely a braver person than I'll ever be.

I'm pretty squeamish about death (having been afraid of dying since I was quite young), but I found this fascinating reading, if even a little comforting, but I would definitely not read if things like this trigger you. There are some very explicit scenes of dissection and discussion of preserving bodies for dissection.

 The Crocodile's Last Embrace, Suzanne Arruda
I hadn't read the rest of my Jade del Cameron books in ages. This one, number six, is an action-fan's dream. Jade's great love, the movie maker Sam Featherstone, has not yet returned from the United States, and the once fearless Jade had, in the interim, gone back to France and seen an eerie vision of her dead fiancé David Worthy, killed in the carnage of The Great War. Now back in Kenya, she is receiving notes from David and seeing visions of him. Her friends tell her she needs to relax and hope Sam will return soon; then Jade almost witnesses a car accident at a bridge in which a car was deliberately pushed off the side. This is only the beginning of a murder investigation and more—in which Jade begins to suspect her one true foe: David's evil mother Lilith.

This book gets off with a bang and never quite stops moving. I figured out part of what was causing Jade's distress almost immediately, but it didn't spoil the rising tension and the heart-stopping climax. I'm sorry there's only one of these unread left. Probably the best of the books since the first, Mark of the Lion.

  For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women,  Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
I had to pick this up for Women's History month. In general I enjoyed it, although it was more scholarly than I expected. The basic premise is that although most society was patriarchal in the past, men had their roles and women had equally as important, but different, roles. However, with the coming of industrialization came masculinism, which infantilized women, drove away "wise women" and midwives who knew the workings of women's bodies, and turned them over to male doctors, who had all sorts of fantastically weird ideas, like that menstruation messed with a woman's sense of reason, that all women automatically wanted to be nurturing wives and mothers, and that women's brains were not fit for more complicated reasoning—studying things like medicine, physics, chemistry, etc. would make them "less womanly" and might even burn out a woman's brain! (And with that came the "rest cure" as Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which would drive anyone stark raving mad.) Just the change in nurturing children between 1900 and 1960 (going from treating kids like miniature adults to considering children as small angels to keeping children to rigorous time schedules even as babies and then Dr. Spock says "For heaven's sake, cuddle and love them!") switched back and forth so quickly that you were liable to get whiplash.

Illuminating and infuriating, but be prepared for much quotation from medical texts.

A Baker's Dozen of Favorite Books for 2020

Well, something had to be decent in 2020...

Always hard to whittle these books down to even thirteen. Must give honorable mention points to all three Longmire mystery books (Another Man's Moccasins, The Dark Horse, Kindness Goes Unpunished) I devoured this year, plus my first read ever of Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, with its POC protagonist who has been whitewashed on book covers for years, and to Linda Newbury, who managed to give me a decent sequel to Peyton's Flambards books.

 The Mutual Admiration Society, Mo Moulton (ARC, Dorothy Sayers and her friends at Oxford and beyond)

 The Olive Farm, Carol Drinkwater (book sale find, actor Drinkwater's memoir of the crumbling farm she and her partner bought in France)

 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1937-1943, From Novelist to Playwright (Volume 2), edited by Barbara Reynolds (book sale find, self-explanatory)

 The Moor, William Atkins (nonfiction look at the various moors of England; they're not all the same)

 The Narnian, Alan Jacobs (book sale find, story of C.S. Lewis as told by his writings)

 America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Gail Collins (book sale find, overview of the women who did not make it into the history books)

 The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson (his newest about the Churchills during World War II)

 The Annotated Black Beauty, Anna Sewell, introductions/annotations by Ellen B. Wells and Anne Grimshaw (a book find from a friend thinning out her library, expands knowledge of the novel and the treatment of Victorian animals)

 Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour, Christopher Fowler (newest in Fowler's series; two elderly detectives look for a motive in unconnected murders)

 A Furious Sky, Eric Jay Dolin (ARC, history of hurricanes in the "new world")

 Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, Todd S. Purdum (the team that was ahead of its time even thought they're thought by some to be "treacly" today)

 This Old Man, Roger Angell (book sale find, essays about life, sports, and everything in between by "New Yorker" editor and stepson of E.B. White)

 Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, Stephanie Graves (ARC, wartime mystery along similar lines as Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders, but, IMHO, better)

Books Completed Since September 1

 1939: The Last Season of Peace, Angela Lambert

I admit, I picked this up because it was only a dollar at the book sale. It's a study of the 1939 "Season"—the time of year when young, wealthy debutantes were presented officially to society, and of course were available for marriage!—in England. And if this book is any indication, I am so glad I didn't grow up wealthy! While I suppose we all dream about winning the lottery, I spent my time reading this book feeling sorry for these rich girls whose time, especially during the Season, was not their own; who were drilled in careful deportment and how to curtsey to the queen, and night after night spent hours dressing, then hours more at debut parties mouthing polite platitudes to young men who were as nervous as they were.

This book was written in the late 80s, so many of the "debs" who came of age that year were alive for the author to interview to the author. Several of these young ladies kept souvenirs of their Season, and the book is liberally illustrated with photos and memorabilia from Susan Meyrick, who kept every single item from her Season, from dried corsages to dance cards. It all looked glamorous and fun, but behind the scenes the girls were exhausted or shy; some, of course, rebelled against the strict behavior codes of the times, yet sometimes still participated in the routines. One of the novelties of the 1939 Season was that Joseph Kennedy was still serving as Ambassador to Great Britain and his vivacious daughter "Kick" (Kathleen) was also presented to the Court at this time, escorted by her brother, later President John F. Kennedy.

 

The most amazing detail here is that you would think these girls, being wealthy and gone on tours of Europe and other places, would have been very worldly, but it was exactly the opposite. Although being presented at the "Season" meant they were ready for marriage, most of them didn't know anything about sex. Some of them had never kissed a boy, even at the "ripe old" marrying age of eighteen, they didn't know how babies were made, and they had never met anyone of a lower social standing than they were except their own servants. They were carefully protected from the "bad things" in life by their fathers, mothers, and brothers. Some of them had no idea how poor some people were; they knew everyone wasn't rich, of course, but they'd never seen anything squalid or horrible. (Fathers would, even in the 20th century, not permit their girls to read newspapers!)

Having never been interested in "debs" and their Season, because the events happened before so many British young men and women were thrown into the maw of the second world war, and because the stories came directly from the debs themselves, I did enjoy reading about what an ordeal this was.

 Murder at Chateau sur Mer, Alyssa Maxwell

Emma Cross, a distant (and poor) relation of the Vanderbilt family, works as a newspaper reporter for the Newport Observer, and is covering a polo game at the Newport Casino. All the finest families, including Senator George Wetmore and his wife Edith, are attending the match—when a disheveled woman comes on to the field looking for Mrs. Wetmore. Behind her Emma hears someone say "Lilah." From her brother and her male cousins, Emma learns that Lilah Buford works with some other well-know ladies at the notorious Blue Moon Tavern—but if that news isn't shocking enough, next day Emma is summoned to the Wetmores' home, Chateau sur Mer, where Lilah lies dead at the foot of one of the staircases. Edith Wetmore implores Emma to discreetly look into the crime before her husband's career is tarnished.

And if Emma didn't have enough problems, she discovers Derrick Andrews, who's in love with her, is back in town, and his mother is ready to marry him off to her. But Derrick has been out of her life for some time, and she's discovered new feelings for Newport police detective Jesse Whyte.

Emma's investigation will take her from the poorest and most ramshackle sections of Newport all the way to the prestigious Reading Room, a male-only bastion; she will face violence, fire, and even the loss of her living. But she works her way through the complicated threads of the mystery—and finally manages to take care of that horse I'm always complaining about. 😀

Incidentally, George and Edith Wetmore were real people; he served as both senator and governor of the state of Rhode Island, and they lived well, but very quietly, at their smaller "summer cottage," Chateau sur Mer, which you can tour.

  Murder is In the Air, Frances Brody

This newest Kate Shackleton mystery (#12), taking place in 1920s Great Britain, has Kate, a private inquiry agent, and her partner, Jim Sykes, hired to look in at the Barleycorn Brewery in Yorkshire, owned by William Lofthouse. Lofthouse, newly married to a young wife, and, wishing to turn more of the running of the company over to his nephew James, hopes Kate and Sykes will spot some little problems that he thinks are keeping the company from running at top efficiency. In the meantime, the brewery is drumming up favorable publicity by promoting a local girl, Ruth Parnaby, who's a whiz in the personnel department, as "brewery queen," a twist on a beauty queen—if Ruth's efforts aren't sabotaged by her drunken father, who's already driven his wife away with both Ruth and young George longing to follow her.

Two plots are running here concurrently: the mystery of who might be sabotaging things at the brewery (a recent new beer was fouled with dirt and rubbish) and also a mystery surrounding one of the workers. It's possible they are both linked, but when two different murders happen, Kate and Sykes discover there are no simple answers in this one.

Brody addresses PTSD (Ruth's dad was not a brute before his war service) and spousal and child abuse against the colorful traditional goings-on in the Great Britain of that era of crowning a pretty young girl "queen" of a certain industry (cloth mills, railways, coal mines) to perk up tough times in industrial towns. Brody reverses the usual "the mysteries are connected" plot in this story, so there are several different endings to several different crimes, leading to several different cliffhangers, and once again Kate's niece Harriet and landlady Mrs. Sugden prove themselves equal to being part of the solution. The local characters (Ruth, George, Annie, Parnaby, Joe Finch, Miss Crawford, William and Eleanor Lofthouse, Miss Boland the music teacher) are all interesting characters in their own right, and several of them will have your sympathy before the story is concluded.

 This Old Man, Roger Angell
All I knew before I read this book was that Roger Angell was E.B. White's stepson, the son of White's wife Katherine Angell and her first husband, and that he had worked at "The New Yorker," which kept his stepfather and writers like Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and others in the public eye for years. He was, in fact, both a "New Yorker" writer and editor, and this book collects his most famous essay "This Old Man" along with several dozen other essays, profiles, verse, book reviews, and more from his career at the magazine.

I complained in a previous month that Our Boston had way too many sports references. Well, Angell was a sports fan, and I expect sports essays here, but yet in his case I never minded them. When he wrote about sports it was always interesting or compelling in some way, or portrayed a sports figure in a different manner in which I thought of them before. Some of the essays are funny, some brought a tear to the eye, but all of them are a delight to read. I found this for a $1.50 at the book sale, but it's well worth full price.

 The Dark Horse, Craig Johnson

Walt Longmire pulls into the tiny town of Absalom on a mission. He might not have been on that mission had not the Campbell County jail gotten a bit overcrowded and asked Walt if they could keep a prisoner in the Durant jail for a few days: Mary Barsad, a woman who had confessed to killing her husband after he set their barn on fire with her eight horses inside, including an expensive prize Quarter horse named Wahoo Sue, and killed them all.

Walt ends up believing that Mary is innocent, and because he is Walt Longmire, must go to the scene of the crime to investigate and correct this wrong before Mary is convicted. But the citizenry of Absalom aren't going to make it any easier for him, even if no one liked Mary's husband Wade. (Hell, even his brother didn't like him.) But with a little help from his friends both old—Henry Standing Bear and his crew back in Durant—and new—grizzled Herscel Vanskike and the local barmaid Juana and her son Benjamin, Walt is sure as hell going to try.

As I've said previously, I'm not fond of police procedurals, but I love the Longmire books, and especially love Johnson's supporting characters in each book; in this one it's the boy Benjamin and a wonderful horse who is introduced about halfway through the story. (Henry Standing Bear is understood. I love Henry with all my heart.) This one is a thrill-a-minute between the bully boy Cliff Cly that Walt meets in Absalom, a chase through the hills, and the real villain of the piece. The only mystery that remains is how Walt can get beaten up so many times and still manage to function!

 Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, Stephanie Graves

I got this book from Netgalley not long after I read Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders, and the two of them have a little of the same vibe: young woman in her twenties living in a small English village as World War II rages—Poppy has trained as an air-raid warden, Olive is the 22-year-old daughter of a veterinarian and pigeon fancier. As much as I liked Poppy Redfern, I almost enjoyed Olive Bright more. The story opens as Olive's best friend George is just leaving the small village of Pipley to join the RAF, and she too wishes to do something for the war effort. Her father has volunteered their homing pigeons to the Army's National Pigeon Service's for courier duty; unfortunately the recruiters know of Dr. Bright's mercurial tempers and are avoiding the Bright loft. Instead, two other, secretive Army officers approach Olive, saying they would like to use the Bright pigeons, but for super-secret war matters they can't tell her about. Eager to get the pigeons in action and without asking her father, Olive challenges the two men to put the Bright birds to the test.

 

In the meantime, with the village women rallying around the war effort, overbearing busybody Miss Husselbee is being more of a martinet than usual. While everyone is annoyed by her, they're also shocked when she turns up murdered at the Bright loft, found by Jonathon, the Brights' young evacuee. Is her death tied to the secret movements of Jameson Aldridge and his partner, the officers who wish to use Olive's pigeons? And, if not, who in the village would want Miss Husselbee dead?

I really, really liked the fact that even to the end of the book there was no effort made to pair up Olive with Jameson Aldridge as Poppy had been paired with the American officer. They are contentious with each other through the end. There's a Welsh corgi in this story as well, and it's called a corgi, not "a Welsh herding dog." I thought the pigeon angle of the tale was a fresh one, something not involving spy training, American bases, or anything else that has been used in historical mysteries before, and enjoyed the fact that the birds are all named after book characters, and Olive herself is a devotee of Agatha Christie mysteries and still is a bit of an innocent at heart. There's also a subplot about Olive's late mother that turned out to be not what it seemed, and I liked that Olive had a good relationship with her stepmother, who is gamely battling multiple sclerosis. I'm not sure if the author plans a sequel, but if she did, I would definitely read it.

 Betsy and Billy, Carolyn Haywood
In a fit of nostalgia I picked this up at some sort of used bookstore on one of our New England vacations, as it was a discard from the Seekonk (MA) public library. Haywood, a prolific children's writer and illustrator who studied under Howard Pyle, had two different series, Betsy (begun 1939) and Eddie (begun 1947), as well as many stand-alone books. I believe by the 1970s the Eddie series was more well known, although the last Betsy book was published in the 1980s.

The Betsy series was one of those "slice of life" (middle class) kids books I ignored when I was of the age to read them, being more crazy about books with animal protagonists. It covers Betsy's second grade school year, with a Hallowe'en party at school, the birth of her little sister on Christmas day, making cookies for the second-grade class' mothers on Valentine's Day, having a Mother Goose exhibition on May Day, and a bazaar to earn money for playground equipment during the last week of school. There's also a couple of funny chapters revolving around Betsy's best friend Billy's dog Mopsie-Upsy Downsy and Betsy's own dog Thumpy. While there are no minority children pictured, the stories are very simply told with a "Mister Rogers" flavor: gentle lessons about accepting yourself as you are, doing your best, forgiving friends who hurt you. Haywood's numerous illustrations are simple and evocative, and several of them, like Betsy wearing leggings to visit Santa Claus, open a window to another era. (As well as one that would make parents gasp now: in the Valentine baking chapter, Billy gets to light the gas oven!) 

 Here's England, Ruth McKenney & Richard Bransten

This is a darling book I found at one of the library book sales, written by two Americans who fell in love with England and return often, and then finally decided to write a guidebook of their experiences and favorite places. They are both history and literature buffs, so most of the sights they pass on are historical and literary in nature—if you're looking for restaurant recommendations and stuff about pop stars, this isn't the book for you.

 

The real charm in this book is that (1) Ruth attempts to explain the convoluted history of England without boring you to death, but also to apprise you of some of the neat characters involved that you usually don't read about, like Margaret of Anjou (who had more cojones than most of the men who surrounded her)—and it does pretty much make sense!, and (2) it was written in 1950 and updated slightly in 1955, so you aren't going to hear about the Eye, the Gherkin, and Canary Wharf; in fact, when McKenney/Bransten talk about St. Paul's Cathedral, they spend several paragraphs mentioning how sad it is that the surrounding area is still covered with debris from the German bombing of London during World War II, and mourn the classic London churches that were too damaged to save and that had been razed. You are looking partially at an England that doesn't exist anymore, one that came to an end with austerity and the Great Smog of London that killed thousands in 1952.

 

It's written in a light style that you don't see in guidebooks anymore, with a real affection for the country and the cities visited, and makes you long for a time machine to go back and see it as it was then, destroyed buildings, coal fires, and all. And she walks around Oxford. I love reading about Oxford.

 

 Death Comes to the School, Catherine Lloyd

It has been three years since Lucy Harrington and Major Sir Robert Kurland married, but as their third Christmas together approaches, Lucy is in a very sober mood. She and Sir Robert have not gotten on well since the summer, when she suffered a miscarriage. He seems to be avoiding her and she is slowly becoming convinced he is no longer in love with her. And then a disturbing thing happens: Lucy visits the village school and discovers the new teacher, Miss Broomfield, is a martinet, with an obsession about sin, who bullies the children and her two young assistants. The teacher was hired back in the summer, when she was so ill, and she can't believe the woman came so highly recommended, but definitely wishes her replaced, but before that can happen, Miss Broomfield is found dead in her classroom, with a quill pen viciously stabbed into her eye. The girl who found her, Josephine, one of two charity children in the school, is hysterical. Although Sir Robert warns his wife to stay out of the matter, Lucy can't help getting involved in the mystery as she plans Christmas at both Kurland Hall and at her father's (the vicar) rectory. Some help arrives in the form of Sir Robert's vivacious Aunt Rose—but the mystery only grows more perplexing when expensive jewelry is found in Miss Broomfield's quarters.

I love these characters, so I'll just hold my tongue about that silly romance-novel quibble I always have: the characters don't speak to each other. (In fact, Lucy chides someone else at the end of the book for not doing the same thing, when she and Sir Robert are tippytoe-ing around each other for nearly the entire book; one longs for them to have a proper fight and have things all come out.) Otherwise the story is entertaining, the mystery suitably convoluted, and Aunt Rose is a delightful character (someone else realizes that as well, in time). All the flurry of an early 19th century Christmas preparatory season just add more color to the tale, and some favorite characters return: Lucy's friend Sophia and her old bete noire Penelope, now married to the town doctor.

Just one thing: don't Lucy's brothers have names? If they were introduced in the first book I've forgotten, but it's more like Lloyd has forgotten, too—she calls them nothing through the entire book but "the twins" and it's like they have no identity other than being twins. Can we have some names and personalities here? Also, how does Lucy's father manage to remain the vicar when he spends most of his days riding and living easily while the curate does all the work? This must be some Anglican custom I don't understand.

 Honestly, Katie John!, Mary Calhoun
This was the third in another series I missed as a kid, so I grabbed it up for a dollar to see what I'd missed. I know I have read the first book, when the Tucker family temporarily relocated to a riverfront home in Missouri to repair and then sell their great-aunt's four-floor house. Instead they decide to stay and run the big place as a boardinghouse. In the second book, apparently Katie John, an irrepressible 10-year-old, helps her parents run the boardinghouse, deals with going to a new school, and gets a beagle puppy she names Heavenly Spot.

In the third book, Katie John enters sixth grade and is immediately put off by the other girls in her class talking about boys. She is still as happy-go-lucky as ever, riding her bike, playing with Spot, and hunting geodes with a boy in her class, Edwin. But when the boys and girls both tease her at the annual fair, she declares she hates boys, hurting Edwin's feelings, but rallies the girls around her briefly. But the girls one by one drift back to their friendships with the boys, and Katie feels increasingly left out. One week she tries being madcap, another day she tries being a lady instructed via an 1896 etiquette book she found in her great-aunt's library, and finally she moves her bedroom to the very top of the house, all the time confused about who she is and what she "should" be.

Katie John's emotional experiences touched me closely. I remember that age, being scornful of the silly romance talk from the other girls. Having watched my mother and my aunts, I was convinced at that age, and throughout my teens that boys (and, later, men) were just simply too much work! And all they talked about were cars and sports! Boring. I felt the most badly because Katie's confusion over her own self nearly messed up her friendship with Edwin, which was a true partnership in exploring and discovery of the world around them rather than silly pre-sexual feelings. But in the end Katie gains some insight in the old house she and Edwin explored together, and they become friends again.

The second book is available to borrow on the Internet Archive, but I'll probably skip the last of the four, which has Katie John developing a crush on a boy in seventh grade after reading Wuthering Heights. Yawn.

 The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, annotated by Leslie S. Klinger
I remember exactly where it used to be at the Akers Mill Borders Books: on top of the endcap of the mystery aisle, sitting there taunting me in its slipcovered glory. Klinger's annotated Sherlock Holmes, all fifty-six canon stories and the four novels, in three volumes, $120 for the set. Even with Borders' legendary 40 percent off coupons, it was just Too Much. And then in April 2008, A Miracle Occurred. Amazon was selling all their annotated books at eight dollars per volume. $120 worth of books for $24? Let me at it! (For the record, I also bought the annotated Secret Garden.)

And there they have sat, stacked one atop the other in the open shelf at the bottom of the Ann & Hope night table I stained and varnished myself, since then. High time I was reading them, what?

 

These are the first two books of short stories in the canon, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, all the way through "The Final Problem," which killed off that annoying Holmes for good, or so thought Arthur Conan Doyle, who wanted to write serious historical fiction and just penned Holmes for the cash. When all London donned black armbands at the "death" of Holmes and even Queen Victoria was peeved, Doyle held out three years before bringing Sherlock back. Serious Holmes fans consider these the best of the crop, but even then Doyle was not really caring about his continuity: in one story Mary Watson calls husband John "James." Dorothy Sayers and other writers came to postulate that Watson's middle initial stood for "Hamish," the Scots form of James, and so "James" was her pet name for him.

 

The footnotes in this book take very seriously the fans' belief that there really was a Sherlock Holmes and so many of them try to reconcile the inconsistencies that already had crept into the stories before the second dozen even went to press. You too can join in the mystery, or ponder why so many Holmes' clients were named "Violet," find out what a gasogene and a tantalus are, how realistic digging under the street in "The Red-Headed League" was, how to figure old-style British money and how much it might be worth at the time, what kind of snake came down the rope, and all sorts of Victorian trivia delights. For serious fans of Sherlock Holmes and, of course, those crazy people like me who get the vapors over annotated books.

 

 The Blueberry Years, Jim Minick 

Ask me what I remember most about this book. I remember that it was one of the last books I bought from the going-out-of-business sale at Borders. (Yes, it's been sitting in a TBR pile that long.)

Jim and his wife Sarah, both teachers, dreamed for years of going out to the country and raising blueberries. Jim's grandparents had a farm on which he recalled halcyon days of picking berries, and both of them wanted to contribute something to the environment, so they buy a small farm on the backroads of Virginia and the book chronicles the backbreaking work—and the friends and customers they accumulated—in their efforts to build sustaining pick-it-yourself blueberry acres (they also harvest for a local farmer's market).

 

I have to admit they have a lot of guts for doing this, especially when they were still working. Imaging teaching all day and spending evenings hoeing, trimming, debugging, picking, weeding, replanting, fertilizing, etc. Just reading it is exhausting. And they make some fast friends, including a neighboring farmer who's always ribbing them (but staunchly behind them), and the folks who come pick week after week when they are open—oh, and if you've never farmed, you will probably be aghast at all the hours they work against how short the blueberry growing season is.

 

Between chapters Jim regales you with facts about blueberries, recipes, and the history of blueberry farming (it was turned into a business by a woman). I enjoyed it pretty well, but it didn't get into my heart the way Gladys Taber's books have (I guess I am still looking for a replacement for Taber!); people who garden, have smallholdings, or who farm will probably be the most emotionally invested, however.

 The Key to Flambards, Linda Newbery

I was very skeptical when I discovered there was a sequel to K.M. Peyton's "Flambards" books. I had watched the television series in 1980, fallen in love with it, bought the first three books and loved them just as much, and then was disappointed by the fourth book (although I must admit that the story is logical, I dislike the fact that Peyton had to make a "villain" out of a favorite character to make the changes she did to the story). I didn't know if anything by anyone else could give me that "Flambards" feeling, and even when I was fifty pages into the story I was still skeptical. While I realize Grace had gone through two terrible traumas, she was so self-absorbed I found her annoying, something I never experienced with Christina Parsons.

 

Never fear, Grace finds her voice and her "Flambardness." She is the great-granddaughter of Christina and Will's daughter Isobel. Her mother, Polly, has just divorced her father, who already has a new girlfriend and a new child coming, and, what is worse, Grace has had her right leg amputated at the knee after being struck by a drunk driver. She's depressed and sees herself as less than whole, although her best friend, school friends, mother, and even father assure her she is still loved, needed, and wanted. An active younger teen, she misses being able to run. When her mother is offered a job at the Flambards Trust, which has taken over the Russell estate, Grace doesn't want to go—but once she befriends Jamie and his sister Charlie, the latter who teaches Grace to ride, and also Marcus, a sullen boy whose father works on the estate, she is suddenly reluctant to leave the countryside, the animals, the woods, and most of all, her heritage—and those are all endangered by the Flambards Trust's inability to make enough cash to stay open. If they don't, the fields behind the home will be sold for expensive tract houses and a shopping center.

 

Newbery weaves the old story—including the character of Fergus, who doesn't appear in the television series—into the new very neatly (there's even a nice family tree at the beginning of the book showing how all the Russells are related), and by the time the story gets galloping (no surprise, Grace finds herself a natural rider, just like Christina), you're invested in all the characters. And Newbery does a nice job of linking the actions of the old generation, such as Will and Mark in the Army, to a new generation (Marcus' father Adrian) and how their problems were addressed differently. We also find out what happened to Mark (Newbery vetted this with Peyton) and if he and Christina had children together.

Although her prose cannot match K.M. Peyton's, nevertheless thanks, Linda Newbery, for a new beginning to Flambards.

  St. Nicholas, Volume LIX, November 1931 through October 1932, St. Nicholas Publishing Company
Holy cow, this was the most difficult bound volume of "St. Nicholas" I've ever had to go through. If I thought the changes from The Century Company to Scholastic were bad (St. Nicholas, Volume LVII, May through October 1930, reviewed a few months back), the changes throughout this year were even worse: "The Watch Tower" disappears completely by May, replaced a few months earlier by "The St. Nicholas Handicrafters." The League is whittled down to four pages, and by the time October 1932 rolls around there are only fifty pages (half of it in teeny-tiny print) and eight stories/poems in each issue. Plus, oddly enough, suddenly in May half the ads in the issues are for New York hotels rather than for boys'/girls' schools, bicycles, utilities, toys, etc.

Not to mention "The Young Ravenals" is possibly the worst serial ever to grace the pages of the magazine (seriously, I thought that was "Driven Back to Eden" from the 1880s). Very strange story of a mother who must leave her family to teach in another city when her husband, a muralist, isn't paid due to the Depression. She leaves the family in the capable hands of their "colored" cook, Judy, who breaks her leg right after Mother leaves. So the four kids, from high schooler Randolph down to perpetually hungry eight-year-old Bobby, and artist dad try to cope with little success since apparently not one of them knows a thing about keeping house. The two sisters, one an aspiring concert pianist, have a problem with the same boy, who's a pilot, with a denouement that involves a laundry basket and a mud slide. Other serials are better, but just marginally: "The Return of the Ruby" is obnoxiously imperialist, "Tommy Dane on the Royal Road" chock full of violence, and the only hope comes from "The White Feather," the serial which is left hanging when the volume ends, which has a topping heroine named "Bobby" with a strong sense of justice.

  A Thread Across the Ocean, John Steele Gordon

The story of the transatlantic cable from American history class (400 years in about 200 hours): Cyrus Field hired a ship, laid the first cable, it broke, they laid a second cable, it worked. Everyone was happy.

 

Of course, like everything, there's lots more to the story. As with the moon landing, many people didn't care that they couldn't talk to Europe. That was a rich person's problem, wasn't it? And there was the matter of money: the British were eager to finance it, the U.S. Government couldn't have cared less. Field had to get financing for the cable from American businessmen. (Field, son of a clergyman, had a prodigious family history: two of his brothers were lawyers, a third was a minister who also wrote an account of the laying of the cable, his great-great-whatever grandfather John Field was the first Englishman to disseminate Copernicus' theory of heliocentricity to the British Isles.) The cable had to be specially made (the copper they were initially going to use was so impure it barely transferred electrical power; it couldn't be sheathed in rubber because that was then too fragile, so they were required to use gutta-percha instead), the ships had to be specially fitted to lay the cable, they had to find the shortest route (it was initially going to be laid from Halifax, Nova Scotia, but the shortest distance across the ocean was from St. John's, Newfoundland, a tiny village)...well, you have to read the entire story to get the idea of the technological and meteorological hardships they ran into. Plus a lot of familiar historic names pop up, like Samuel Morse, the painter who invented telegraphy, and Peter Cooper, who built the first functioning U.S. locomotive.

What reads as "so old fashioned" today was the technological miracle of its kind, and as groundbreaking as and in reality the forerunner of our world-wide telephone and internet system.

 

 Janie's Freedom, Callie Smith Grant

The war between the States is over, and Rubyhill Plantation lies in ruins. The widowed owner leaves for her home in Pennsylvania, but not before reminding the slaves that they are now free and may have anything they find in the house (she also apologizes to them, which is a shock to everyone). Eleven-year-old Janie, ripped away from her parents when she was only six years old, and since then under the care of elderly Aunty Mil, wonders what she will do next, but the older former slaves say the best thing for Janie and the other young people of the plantation, teenage Aleta and Blue, and twins Nathan and Lucy, is to head north to a place called Chicago where they have heard "colored" people are respected. In warm clothes foraged from the house and food supplied by the older people, the five children head north, while at another plantation, Janie's mother waits, hoping her husband will return to her (he was sent away to work on a chain gang during the war).

 

Janie and her friends head north just as autumn approaches. Many days they know hunger, and they are afraid to beg for food for fear of antagonizing white people. Yet on their journey they are surprised to be helped by at least one white boy, and when they are in their greatest hour of need, a dirty red-haired girl helps the five despite her own distressing living conditions. In the meantime Anna, Janie's mother, just wishes that she could find her daughter again.

All these "Sisters at Heart" books are Christian-oriented, but this one seems more Christian-themed than the others I've read, and it makes the book seem a little stereotypical (Janie is good at singing spirituals, for instance, and of course there is the standard Very Happy Ending as ordained by God). It's a very gentle retelling of the former slave experience which would probably be appropriate for a younger child.

 

 The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Story of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl, Ann Turner

This is certainly a more realistic book than "Dear America's" previous Native American effort, which tried to put a positive spin on the Carlisle Indian School. In fact, it's a downright sad narrative, as it should be. Sarah Nita, a Navajo girl, lives with her parents and little sister Kaibah in what will eventually become the eastern edge of the state of Arizona. It is 1864, and the US Cavalry is tired of the raids the Navajo are carrying out against white settlers. So they are rounding them to send to a fort in what is now New Mexico. The sisters escape the first sweep that takes their parents, and they courageously walk all the way to a canyon where other Navajo live and are taken in. But the soldiers are relentless, capture the canyon tribe, and Sarah Nita and Kaibah join the exhausting forced march that will take them all the way to Ft. Sumter almost to the Texas line. (Think the story of the Trail of Tears from Cherokee history and you will have it, only instead in a desert setting, which makes it worse.)

 

In a change from the original diary format, since Sarah Nita did not know English dates, she tells her granddaughter, who is writing the story down, the entries are headed by her memories of a certain day. This seems to have confounded a few readers, who complained they couldn't tell "what date it was." A Navajo girl in 1864 would not know that info, and to me it made the story more realistic.

 

It's an extremely moving story, but also slow moving, and what happens to the children and to the tribe could be very disturbing to a sensitive child. Care must be taken that this will not traumatize the reader; he or she might need some preparation first, or wait until they are a little older.

 

 A Cruel Deception, Charles Todd

In this latest of the Bess Crawford mysteries, the Great War is over, and Bess is still providing post-operative care for the wounded, but she's wondering about her future. If she continues in nursing, she wishes to keep working with soldiers. But she is summoned to London for a clandestine meeting with the Matron of nursing, who wishes Bess to go to Paris to get information about her son. He was taking part in the peace talks, but has abruptly cut off communication. Matron believes he may be having problems after being wounded years earlier at the Battle of Mons. Bess soon finds her quarry, Lieutenant Lawrence Minton, and is deeply disturbed to find him addicted to laundanum and suffering from crippling guilt, with only a French friend to try to curb his destructiveness.

 

The first half of the story moves very slowly as Bess tries desperately to discover what has driven Lt. Minton to the brink of insanity. Once the story shifts to Paris the pace picks up as Bess enlists a Parisian doctor and his wife in helping the officer, but this only endangers Bess' life. What terrible secret is Minton holding back that violence is being done in his name?

 

One of the problems with this book is its title. You know from the start that Minton is no danger to Bess, Marina, or anyone because the title tells you so: he's being deceived. The mystery is what the deception is.

For those who have read all or most of the Bess Crawford series and wonder: Simon's not in this one. He's supposed to be in Scotland and may "have a lassie." This thought does give Bess some pause...but is it a sisterly pause, or a lover's pause? There will be no resolution to that question in this book! However, there is a clue that Bess may be on his mind.

 

 MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea, Otto F. Apel, MD and Pat Apel

How true was M*A*S*H, the movie and the television series? Well, the doctors there pretty much didn't have a stable of writers ready for a quick quip. But the fact that the doctors didn't respect military tradition that much? Or that the work was dirty, exhausting, frightening, and daunting? That the weather was often sizzlingly hot or numbingly cold? All true and in spades.

 

Dr. Apel writing is a bit dry and contains statistical figures, but still fascinating story of the reality of the MASH units that existed for only a short time on Korean soil (they were changed before the Korean War even ended). I was appalled to discover that all the MASH doctors were just pretty much shipped to the front with no training on how to deal with battle wounds, military protocol, or even the living conditions. Unlike the rawest of soldiers, they didn't even have basic training. When Apel came off the jeep from Japan, a Korean teenager took his bags to his tent, and he proceeded to being in the operating room for over 80 hours, and thus began his one year tour of duty.

Apel served as an advisor to the television series for two years, and if you were a M*A*S*H  viewer, you will see some of the stories his experiences inspired, including the episode where everyone dyes their hair red and another where a peephole in the nurses' shower is arranged. The most interesting part of the story talks about the advances in vascular surgery that came from the surgeons' experimentation at the MASH units. The surgeons had been forbidden to do the surgery by the Army, who said it was quicker just to amputate the limb affected by the arterial injury, but the doctors felt not repairing the injury went against their Hippocratic oath.

If you want the real skinny on a MASH unit, this may be the book for you.

Books Completed Since July 1

 Re-read: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
I remember wanting to order this from the Doubleday Bargain Book Club as a teen, but my mom nixed it when she saw it was "an underground classic." Later I bought a paperback copy. It's the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a young human born on Mars and brought up from infancy by Martians. When he is returned to Earth by a later exploratory team, he must learn to be human...but his strange upbringing has left him with strange abilities and a unique outlook on life. But political machinations are going on behind the scenes, and a nurse who befriends "Michael" takes the bold step to bring him to the estate of an eccentric attorney/writer.

This book has been controversial from the start—the free love and communal living themes scandalized conservatives when it was published. More recently it's been scorned because all its female characters seem to love having sex and getting pregnant (alas, as Heinlein got older his fiction seemed to revolve around activities that he was probably no longer fit for). Many people hate Jubal Harshaw because he's an opinionated old coot spouting all of Heinlein's pet theories. (Me, that's why I like Jubal: as an introvert, I admire his opinionated outbursts, whether I agree with them or not, because I can't vocalize what I think.)

I read this early enough in my life that none of this really matters. These folks are like old friends. I roll my eyes now at the sex-and-pregnancy stuff, but you have to note one thing: none of the women in the story are at any time forced into these activities. They go into it because they want to, not because some man is bullying them into it. (And a few of them are physically capable of taking out any guy who does try to bully them.) In some cases, for good or for bad, it's women like Agnes Douglas who are the real power in the world. Mike views all the craziness of human life as a stranger to the human condition in which each of us grows up—the social, political, religious, societal, behavioral mores that we are taught from babyhood—and attempts to explain how strange all these mores appear when approached from a total alien viewpoint. The book is full of memorable characters, like the opinionated Jubal, the imperious Agnes Douglas who runs her household and her husband's career with equal shrewdness, Dr. Mahmoud reconciling his devout Muslim beliefs with new ideas, Mike himself, Patty Paiwanski the "tattooed lady" and snake lover, and even minor characters like Jubal's mechanic Duke, Captain Von Tromp and Dawn Ardent.

At times rambling—we have the uncut edition that was released several years back—and annoying, but sometimes cannily on the mark. YMMV.

 Re-read: Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes

 Young Americans Colonial Williamsburg: John's Story, 1775, Joan Lowery Nixon
This is the sixth and final book in Nixon's series taking place in Williamsburg during its heyday as colonial capitol of Virginia, centering on 11-year-old John, next to youngest child of Robert Carter Nicholas, member of the House of Burgesses, and opens with Governor Dunmore's capture of the store of gunpowder held in Williamsburg's Magazine. To Mr. Nicholas, this is just another in a long list of injustices toward the Virginia colony that he hopes can be resolved with debate and negotiation, but to 20-year-old George Nicholas, this is it. To him there is no expectation that Britain and the American colonies can find common ground. It is time to fight for freedom. John, who respects his father but hero-worships George, he can see that both men make valid points—but his brother's acts, to an 11-year-old, are more exciting, and soon he and his best friend Robert are attending militia drills.

One of the things I appreciate most is that Nixon doesn't try to make a 21st century "woke" boy out of John. When Governor Dunmore threatens to arm the slaves if the colonists don't behave properly, John is genuinely confused. The Nicholases treat their slaves humanely. His mother feeds, clothes, and nurses them. Why on earth would they take up arms and fight against their family? It's only after he hears the family slaves talking about taking up arms and after a few events convince him how important freedom is, that he understands that freedom isn't something just reserved for white people, that all deserve freedom.

The gem in this series of six books is still the volume about Caesar, the enslaved boy coping with both growing up and finding his place in a world where decisions have been taken away from him, but all the books are worth reading.

 Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love, edited by Andrew Blaunder
This is a compilation volume of essays written after the Boston Marathon bombing about what each author loves about his favorite city: essays by George Plimpton, Dennis Lehane, Susan Orlean, Pico Iyer, John Updike, and more. Some of the best essays are the ones that actually talk about the bombing, the shock and indignation, the people who raced toward the carnage rather than away to help the wounded. There are stories about Dorchester Avenue, about Cambridge, the Boston accent, Filene's Basement, a girl who appeared on the PBS series Zoom, Boston marriages, and more. My favorite essay was Scott Stossel's "Reading Around Boston," about the Boston bookstores I came to love in the 1980s and which are mostly gone now and which I ache for intensely.

I enjoyed most of the book, but there are too many essays about sports. There are so many wonderful historical places, great places to see like the Museum of Science and the Rose Kennedy Greenway or the aquarium or the museums, quirky television stations like WSBK, and all everyone talks about are the Red Sox (and the Bruins and the Patriots). I expected some mention of them, as you can't mention Boston without mentioning the Sox, but it seemed sports turned up in every other essay.

 Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour, Christopher Fowler
Every time I read a Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery, I wonder to myself how Fowler is possibly going to top the last one. And, just as always, I finished this newest volume thinking "Wow!" Especially at the end of the penultimate chapter.

Christmas celebrations have ended and once again the Peculiar Crimes Unit is called in when a man of Indian descent is found hanging upside down from a tree, surrounded by occult items. His time of death is estimated at 4 a.m. Senior detectives Bryant (the eccentric, outside-the-box theorist) and May (the erudite one) and their team are puzzling whether it's some sort of bizarre cult event (of course Arthur Bryant immediately contacts his friend Maggie, a practicing witch), bored punks, or more sinister forces when another  4 a.m. death occurs, a suicide this time—or was it? Unknown to them, a chubby young woman named Sparrow who was out watching bats with a conservation group has befriended the killer, and also knows both of the victims who died. In the meantime one of the PCU is not really who they seem, and John May has a secret which may endanger the group.

London folklore,  Bryant's daffy investigative style, tensions simmering in the PCU, Sparrow's unwitting friendship, and the real story behind the crimes are deftly woven into another Fowler page-turner. I love these books. I can't wait for the next one to see how the resolution to aforementioned Chapter 49 comes out.

 Produce & Conserve, Share & Play Square: The Grocer and the Consumer on the Home-Front Battlefield During World War II, edited by Barbara McLean Ward
I am embarrassed that it took me so long to finish this book. I bought it ten years ago at Strawbery Banke, having fallen in love particularly with the little grocery "The Little Corner Store" which is 1940s themed and reminded me so much of the "spas" and superettes of my childhood. I remember wanting it so badly, but because of its size was afraid it was too expensive, until we went into the gift shop and I found out it was only $10. Then it got shuffled to the bottom of a to-be-read pile and passed over.

Basically it tells the story of World War II home-front life and food rationing as told through Bertha Abbott's Little Corner Store, which opened in 1919 and closed in 1950. There's a general article about the American home front: war bonds, food rationing, propaganda, and another on ration stamps, as well as follow-on articles that concentrate on New Hampshire's war effort and the history of small groceries.

The second half of the book chronicles the reconstruction of the war-era look of Bertha Abbott's corner store. Especially fascinating is how they reproduced the 1940s-era packaging by copying existing remaining boxes from the era and then printing new ones.

 Howloween Murder, Laurien Berenson
This is a novella in Berenson's Melanie Travis mystery series in which a murder comes too close to work: the accused is Harriet Bloom, the super-efficient secretary to the head of Howard Academy, where Melanie works as a special ed teacher. The police think she poisoned Ralph Pender, an elderly neighbor who has dementia, with one of her famous Hallowe'en treats, marshmallow puffs she typically gives away to the neighbors. The headmaster of Howard Academy knows Melanie has rooted out other criminals before; he's hoping she can discreetly suss out this one before the academy gets a bad rep. And Melanie truly believes Harriet could never poison anyone.

There's only one problem with this mystery that is set happily in October in New England, and all the sights and sounds and smells and excitement—autumn leaves, crisp air, Hallowe'en prep, luscious fall foods—that come at that time of the year. Melanie meets some new people, some unfriendly, most of them quirky and nice, she forms a stronger bond with Harriet than she has in years, there's nice bits about Kevin selecting a costume, Aunt Peg manages to not overrun the story for once...but once the actual murderer is introduced, you'll know the person immediately. Yes, you'll have to learn why the crime took place, but you won't need to guess who; trust your first instincts.

Still, I loved every bit of this for the reasons enumerated in the previous paragraph—and one more thing: the subplot involving Melanie and one of the young students at Howard Academy. In the end, that's the element that's the most magical about the whole story.

  Travels, Michael Crichton
I have wanted this book for years after seeing a used copy for sale at the Cobb County main library, but I didn't have cash. At the book sale last fall I finally found a copy. And I guess I enjoyed it.

It's not just a book about travel to specific places, but about Crichton's travel through his life, starting at medical school, which he finished, but discovered he didn't like practicing medicine all that much. Back in medical school he had started writing paperback thrillers and he discovered he liked writing much more than being a doctor.

So over the years he had traveled many places—climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, visited New Guinea, Bangkok, Jamaica, gone swimming with sharks, encountered gorillas—and also investigated many things like psychics, meditation, spoon bending, auras, etc. with an open mind. Some of the travel chapters were quite creepy, like where he tried diving without tanks or went swimming close to sharks. The "woo-woo" chapters were fairly interesting; some of it he found good, some he still didn't believe in when he finished—his point was that he went into them with an open mind. Frankly, the chapter where he talked about having a conversation with a cactus still seemed a bit dumb. And the portion of the book where he talks about a friend taking him to a "child whorehouse" was revolting.

I kind of came out of this book not liking Crichton as much as I had before I started it, even though most of the chapters were interesting. 

 A History of the World in 12 Maps, Jerry Brotton
As a kid, I found maps endlessly fascinating. When I found out there was something called a "cartographer," it joined my "what I want to be when I grow up" list. I even created maps for the locations of the stories I wrote. So it was a cinch I would buy this book.

And I did like it, although it's not a light book and it took me several tries (and years) to get through. The twelve maps are not only ones I were familiar with—the one I understood was the oldest: Ptolemy's, Google Earth, and of course Mercator's map which makes Greenland look larger than continents—plus those I didn't know anything of, including the first map to mention "America," the Hereford "Mappamundi" (which is painted on leather), a French map which is the first drawn from land that was surveyed using modern methods, and more. Maps aren't a story of only drawings, but of societies and how they see the world: the earliest Christian maps had Jerusalem as their center. And of course "north" has always been "up" (which in modern times sorely tries the Australians). The Mercator story, for instance, involved the mapmaker's persecution because of his being a heretic (he was Protestant in a then aggressively Catholic society). And since everyone who loves maps knows the Mercator map so exaggerates the world, there's a chapter about finding the best possible way to portray a round earth on a flat surface.

Don't be misled by my inability to make it through this book for years. It really is absorbing if you are at all a "maphead." 

 When Television Was Young, Ed McMahon, with David Fisher
When I bought this book I didn't even notice that the author was Ed McMahon, let alone the Ed McMahon. With Fisher, who also co-wrote McMahon's memoir, Johnny Carson's long-time announcer (and long-time spokesman for Budweiser) tells the rollicking story of early television, when an announcer had to be quick on his feet and with his mouth. McMahon started on local television in Philadelphia, then went on to New York, where he finally paired with a young host named Carson and the rest was history.

But this just isn't McMahon's story: he begins with the history of television broadcasting as well as some of the famous shows of the day: Today, Your Show of Shows, Toast of the Town, The Tonight Show (of course). He talks of live shows where things went badly and bloopers brought laughs to grim dramas; now-famous actors who cut their teeth on live television; classic scripted shows like Naked City, Amos'n'Andy, Space Patrol; television personalities such as Bob Keeshan, Dave Garroway, Dick Clark, Dennis James, Arlene Francis. And of course there's a sizeable chapter on "Mr. Television" himself, Milton Berle.

It's a fun romp, but McMahon and/or Fisher takes the Milton Berle gag wayyyyy too far. Once the Berle chapter is finished, they resort to a silly gag of "Milton" interrupting every subsequent chapter with a joke. Once or twice might have been cute. The Berle gag runs through half the book and becomes annoying as hell. If you can tolerate it, you'll enjoy the rest of the book.

 Greetings from the Lincoln Highway (Centennial Edition), Brian Butko
People tend to think that Route 66 was the first transcontinental highway, but the Lincoln Highway, started in 1913 and ending in the mid-1920s, came before that highway where you could "get your kicks." "The Lincoln," later US30 and then superseded by Interstate 80, began at 46th Street in New York City and ended in San Francisco in Lincoln Park, following old trails like the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania, the Mormon Trail, the Sauk Trail, and the road to the Donner Pass, plus existing roads and new roads connecting cities. Increasing motor traffic in those days required paved roads, as the "gumbo mud" of the existing roads had been a thorn in the side of horse-drawn carriages for years.

This, the Centennial edition, is a definitive one. It maps how you can follow the original Lincoln and its later "generations" which followed more suitable routes, town by town and state by state from Atlantic to Pacific, and scattered through almost 300 pages of text are wonderful and evocative pieces of memorabilia from the teens to the 1950s: documents, letters, postcards, advertising, photos of tourist camps and motels, napkins, menus, brochures, maps, diaries, newspaper reproductions, essays, cartoons, road signs, monuments, mile markers...in short, anything and everything to capture the essence of the Lincoln Highway. After a while the road directions in the text may get a little tiresome, but every single illustration will bring a smile to anyone who loves history, especially early 20th century transportation and travel.

 The Happy Hollisters and the Mystery of the Totem Faces, Jerry West
Oh, dear. Of all the Happy Hollisters books I have read so far, this one seems to have aged the worst. The action begins when little Sue reports that Joey Brill and his running buddy Will have stolen a totem pole from someone's yard. (Really, how do Joey and Will get away with the crap they pull? They remove something from a neighbor's property and no punishment is meted out? Their parents must know someone in the city government!) The five kids (12-year-old Pete; 10-year-old Pam; Ricky, age 7; Holly, age 6; and Sue, who's four) and their visiting cousins Teddy and Jean rescue the totem pole, which is a reproduction that an old Alaskan "sourdough" has made for one of their neighbors. The man tells them a story about a tribe of Alaska natives who lost an identical totem, which legend says holds a secret. Since Teddy and Jean's dad, a famous comic artist, has run out of ideas for his stories, the next thing both families know, they're headed for Alaska, where the Hollisters of course wish to search for the lost totem so they can return the treasure to the native tribe. In the process, they meet two Alaska native children who have had their boat stolen, so they can't enter a salmon derby. Of course the generous kids want to help them as well!

The story does well describing life in Alaska in the early 1960s, and the two Native children and their family are portrayed respectfully of their culture and their amusements. But by today's standards the treatment of the totem, which is a Native American cultural symbol, is not very respectful: the sourdough shouldn't be building one as a decoration for someone's home. It is at least treated as something special.

The troubling portion of this story is a chapter where the Hollisters visit a hospital. They have befriended a nurse who tells the kids most of her patients are Eskimo children. (We'll skip over the fact that most Americans don't realize that "Eskimo" may come from a pejorative term and you shouldn't use it.) The kids are wild to meet Eskimos and go to the hospital to meet the kids and have a good time playing with them, but some of the language make it sound like they are going to a zoo to meet some exotic animals. (No, the children are not compared to animals. But the language just isn't right, either.)

This is such a good-natured series and most of the Alaskan scenes are handled very well, but I would read the Eskimo chapters first and decide what you might want to say to a child about them.

 A Country Practice, Douglas Whynott
Chuck Shaw operates a mixed practice, small and large animals, in rural New Hampshire with his partner Roger Osinchuk, who does a large part of the horse work. The practice has more work than two veterinarians can handle, so Chuck hired Erika Bruner, a newly qualified vet who wishes to work with cattle. Whynott's story follows the varied cases that happen in a rural animal practice, from palpating cows to see if they're ovulating to dog and cat injuries to the horse practice Roger loves.

Anyone looking for the poetry of James Herriot will be disappointed, however, this is an interesting look into what makes a modern rural veterinary practice tick. Chuck is largely overworked, but can't bear to let down any of his patients, and he would like to take more time off. Roger loves the horse work, and we follow his own personal odyssey with raising a beautiful stud horse named Shawne. Erika throws herself into dairy cow work with gusto, determined to become an expert in detecting pregnancies in cows. Yet she finds there's something missing.

Good reading if you are a fan of the veterinary shows on National Geographic Wild and want to see the ins and outs of the business. Rather troubling when you hear about people putting perfectly healthy animals to sleep for no reason. Liked that Chuck Shaw tried to find them homes so the practice didn't have to do that.

 Re-Read: The Crystal Cave/The Hollow Hills/The Last Enchantment, Mary Stewart
We lived very simply when I was a kid: one car, one television, one phone (fastened on the wall), one radio. We didn't take a real vacation (a.k.a. not going to a relative's house) until my mom went back to work. It wasn't of much consequence, except for me there were never enough books. They were a precious commodity with Dad's limited salary, so most of what I had was the cheap Whitman books that cost less than a dollar, some of them "authorized editions" of television shows, or classics like Beautiful Joe, a few girls' books like the Donna Parker series. Later I'd squirrel away my quarter allowance for three weeks to buy a new Get Smart paperback novel.

Mom finally joined the Doubleday Bargain Book Club, in part to get me some decent reference books. I still have my chunky Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary, the Roget's Thesaurus, my first atlas, all bought with the six-books-for-99-cents option you got for joining. Mom got a sewing book, too, and a calorie-counting book, and something else (I think it was religious). Then for a year we were required to buy a book a month, either the selected offering or an alternative. It's how I first read Leon Uris' QBVII, Gone With the Wind (which was intended for my mom, but which I read in four days), and got copies of six favorite animal novels, including Lassie Come-Home and Misty of Chincoteague.

The Crystal Cave was an odd choice. I'd never been much for lords-and-ladies "thees-and-thous" medieval films like Robin Hood and Camelot. I'd seen Disney's Sword in the Stone and didn't much care about it. But that was the most interesting choice that particular month, and I knew Mary Stewart from her novel The Moon-Spinners.

I fell into her Arthurian world and never came out, just as I knew this time around if I plucked the book off the shelf (I have the one-volume trilogy edition, not the individual books I got from Doubleday) I would have to read through all three books without stopping. I simply fell in love with her Merlin and his world, and since then even when I try other versions of literary Merlin (Barron's, Lawhead's) and video Merlin (I love Nicol Williamson, but the snake-loving weird Merlin of Excalibur was repulsive, and Sam Neill, who could have done a wonderful job with Stewart's Merlin, got instead stuck with a cross-eyed Helena Bonham Carter and a jokey Martin Short in a titular miniseries) they always fall short in some way.

It's hard to explain why I do love it so, because most critics of the books say that Merlin is commonplace, or there's not enough magic. Maybe that's why I do love it so much: it's not a fantasy, it's a historical narrative with a protagonist who just happens to have otherworldly powers. Most of what Merlin achieves is through his intelligence, his education, his quick thinking, his ability to negotiate, and sometimes just his talent for bluffing. He's a man who I wouldn't be awed in meeting, but is very down-to-earth. I also love the portrayals of the other characters in Merlin's orbit: his mother who has never betrayed his father's identity, his father himself, his uncle Uther who eventually becomes king, Uther's Queen Ygraine, the young Arthur and his best friend Bedwyr, and especially Merlin's servants, from Cerdic and Cadal to Ralf and Ulfin, and their relationships with each other. They all seem like real people to me. A plus in this re-reading, from a stay-at-home perspective, are Stewart's beautiful descriptions of a British countryside that was: the lush valleys, the harsh hills, the winter starkness, the spring beauty, and the ruins of old forts and shrines, and the description of fifth-century villages (some of them not always pretty), and how people at each level of society lived, from simple shepherds to innkeepers to blacksmiths all the way to the royal houses Merlin associates with. The final volume of the trilogy may refer to "last enchantment," but for me it's been one that never ends.

 Phebe Fairchild Her Book, Lois Lenski
After two books based on her childhood experiences, Lenski wrote the first of her historical books in 1936. Phebe Fairchild, age 10, is sent to live with her family in the country when her father, a sea captain, takes her mother home to England for a visit and then goes on a voyage to the Mediterranean.  Her grandmother, aunts, and cousins are all welcoming and nice, but they are also strictly religious; warned by her father, Phebe doesn't dare show them her frivolous Mother Goose book, nor the jewelry her mother entrusted her with.

Lenski basically wrote this story as a "slice of life" tale of, as she explains, "child life and country life in 1828 Connecticut," when the United States was on the cusp of becoming an industrial nation. Phebe is one of the witnesses to the expansion of canals to carry goods rather than "freighters" and machine-made goods instead of homespun. Phebe herself is a rather bland little girl, except for one incident of rampant disobedience with a visitor's clothing, so the main charms of this story are noting the upbringing of children in the early 19th century, the sheer hard work of country life, but also of the pleasures and the feasts, of typical plays and pranks of the era, the changes industrialization were already bringing and the resistance of elders to it, and of the unceasing labor of women. She also doesn't stress enough the importance of the Mother Goose book, which was the first published book for children in the US which was not intended to impart a Christian lesson, like the hornbooks and chapbooks that came before, but was simply for a child's amusement—to tell children that it was okay to have fun.

In later historical books, Lenski would add some danger or mystery into the story (the pirate character in Ocean Born Mary, the pioneer journey in A'Going to the Westward, etc.) rather than having a simple series of incidents in a child's life. Still worth reading for Lenski's research and the glimpse into 1820s American rural life.