Book Review: If I Were You (a.k.a. Deception)

Title: If I Were You (US), Deception (UK)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1987

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 978-0385239646

Length: 337 pages

Quote: "Good heavens, Alvey thought, what kind of establishment am I proposing to enter?"

(Partial spoilers appear in this review. No worries, I've not given away how the murder, the elopements (more than one), the medical cases of the 1810s, or any of the really "plotty" plot elements end.)

Alvey Clements and Louisa Winship met for the first time at boarding school, where everyone noticed how much they resembled each other. Rather than being intrigued by the idea that they were cousins, they tended to resent each other: Alvey was an introvert from the fledgling US, Louisa was an extrovert from the British border country. Nevertheless, Louisa wanted to be a missionary in India rather than just go home and marry a neighbor as expected. Alvey wanted to write books. So Louisa pushed upon Alvey the idea of going to the border country and impersonating Louisa, whom nobody had seen for four years or, Louisa guessed, missed very much.

This is a literary novel with elements of Regency and a faint whiff of Gothic. It's not a romance; Louisa will of course find somebody unsuitable to fall in love with, but we see Alvey having a fancy for Louisa's brother, which of course never goes anywhere, and Louisa's brother's friend having a crush on Alvey, which of course is not returned, and Louisa's sister having a crush on the brother's friend. There might have been a sequel in which all this doomed Teen Romance was resolved. There never was. The story ends, to my delight but some readers' resentment, with all four young people dutifully suppressing their feelings.

So what happens? According to the resentful review Amazon has chosen to feature, the novel lacks a plot, presumably meaning that Alvey doesn't have a romance (though other characters do). I disagree. On careful reading it has a lot of plot. In fact part of what happens is that Alvey, who has written a clever, plotty novel (readers of Jane Austen's biography will recognize many plot elements in this novel), discovers that a family story can be even more interesting than a romance. In a quiet way, typical of what happens when an introvert replaces an extrovert, a lot of things happen. Some of them are very bad; when Alvey comes home, people don't stare into her face and realize she's a different girl because they're distracted by an untimely death. Most of the things that happen work out for the good of everyone involved. 

Alvey knows better than to talk to Louisa's immediate family (except for one of the sisters, who becomes her best friend) so she listens politely to them. (Luckily for Alvey it was fashionable for young adults to call older relatives "Sir" and "Ma'am" instead of, say, "Father" or "Grandmother"; if Louisa's grandmother thinks this is an affectation, she doesn't complain.) Having someone to talk to helps each of Louisa's relatives resolve a private problem the others didn't seem to understand. By the time Louisa decides to come back to her own home, everyone has noticed that Alvey is a different person, but they're carrying on with the deception because they like having her around. Alvey never realized that she had any personal charm, any gift for anything but writing witty genre fiction; she discovers that she has. Her brother's friend, a medical student, would want to be a research psychologist if the specialty existed yet, and Alvey would have been an excellent therapist. 

I say this is a splendid coming-of-age novel, no less than The Color Purple, and much easier for sensitive readers to take. Alvey wanted a writing retreat because she'd lost her elders in the US, so her story ends brilliantly with the Winships affirming that of course she's a long-lost cousin and she "ain't drinking out of my cup but of her own." She has a home. Readers may overlook that, in Regency England, she couldn't have had a legitimate romance without one. Maybe she'll stay in her home and be the heir, as everyone else marries or dies; maybe she'll find a man and move out. But there never was a sequel to tell us which.

Let's just say that the attention to a new e-book called Deception made me wonder whether people were looking for the review of this book. I searched the web site. I'd never posted a full-length review of Joan Aiken's 1987 novel here. I thought I had because I'd mentioned it favorably in several other posts. It is in fact one of my all-time favorite novels marketed to adults. I would have loved it in high school or college; I loved it in 1988 when it reached US libraries, and I love it still.

Book Review: All Creatures Great and Small

Title: All Creatures Great and Small

Author: James Herriot

Date: 1972

Publisher: Bantam / St Martin’s

ISBN: 0-553-10759-3

Length: 499 pages

Quote: “My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book...There was no dirt or blood or sweat anywhere.”

The author known as James Herriot earned his living as a veterinarian for years, but really made his fortune when he started writing about his animal patients and the humans who helped and hurt them. Although most of his readers no longer lived with cows and sheep, each book contained some instructive, and some merely poignant or funny, stories about dogs, cats, and horses too. Gruesome details about animals’ diseases are scattered sparsely amidst charming pictures of country landscapes and amusing pieces of human folly. Through the 1970s and 1980s these books were bestsellers.

Of course, some of the people mentioned in these stories were still living, so names and identifying details had to be fictionalized. This volume of a five-book series focusses on the quirks of Herriot’s first employer and co-worker, to whom he gives the names of Siegfried and Tristan Farnon and a story about parents who loved opera. Dr. Farnon and Dr. Herriot are young bachelors; Tristan is a student; the lady known to readers as Helen Alderson Herriot is a pretty, popular girl who can hardly fail to see the farcical side of the three guys’ mostly ridiculous dating lives, but eventually marries James Herriot...and gets a ridiculous honeymoon adventure, at least in the book, as her immediate reward. A theme that runs through the book is the image of an elderly man reflecting on how silly youth is. This image may have served as a drop of oil on the waters in 1972, when grandparents were often called upon to reduce the tensions between students and their parents. Helen is cast as the sensible straightman while Siegfried, Tristan, and James make fools of themselves as regularly as their contemporaries in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.

All the names in these books, including the author's, are fiction; the author's real name was Wight. The events in the stories happened, but not necessarily in the same sequence, or involving the same people, as the books suggest. Herriot originally planned four long volumes, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made Them All; later, by popular demand, he added a sequel entitled Every Living Thing. All are worth reading for pleasure, although the stories are fact-based fiction and the veterinary insights are a hundred years out of date.

Still, some information is evergreen. Instructive stories in All Creatures Great and Small feature a spoiled, overfed dog who nearly died from overeating but recovered his health when put on a reducing diet and treated like a dog, a sad sequence of cows who died because their humans never called the vet until it was too late, and a cow whose inflammation was actually cured by a devoted human who sat up bathing and massaging the cow all night. There are also warnings about the less obvious symptoms of tuberculosis in cattle and the postpartum “madness” in which mother animals can become dangerous. The birth process is draining even in animals, like cats, who give birth easily; brain chemicals can be unbalanced; animal mothers may attack their humans or, less often, their babies.

Although the stories fit together into a sequence with an overarching "story arc," each chapter can be considered an independent short story. If your leisure reading time is limited, no worries—all the books in this series are ideal for those who choose to read just one short chapter a day. Since the only aspect of these books that is less than tasteful is the inherent disgustingness of veterinary medicine, the books also provide what might be called good clean wholesome gross-outs for middle school readers.

This book is warmly recommended to anyone who has not already read it, with the warning that most people over age thirty probably have. 

New Book Review: The Secret Thread

Title: The Secret Thread

Author: Eve Chase

Date: 2026

Publisher: Ballantine

ISBN: 978-0-593-97626-5

Quote (from the galley proof): "[I]nteriors queen Mimi Mott is selling her legendary estate." 

As regular readers know, one stage in the process of traditional book publishing is, when the author and publisher have agreed that the book shall be published, sending a cheap paperback or electronic copy to reviewers so that reviews can be published on the day the book reaches the store. These copies, traditionally called "galley proofs," go out while there's still time to change a word here and there, so publishers remind reviewers not to quote extensively. This book is about what happens when Mimi sells her estate, so chances are that the line quoted above will be in chapter one of your book when you buy it, but it might not be. 

In the world of this novel Mimi Mott's "Mimi House" interior decorating business was not merely a success, like Studio McGee, Kelly Wearstler, or Nate Burkus. It was a household word. Mimi Mott was the influencer of influencers, was to building design what Anna Wintour was to fashion design, became rich and famous. 

Jo, a young writer, really wants to be chosen for the job of writing the book that will go with the sale of Mimi Mott's estate. Mimi has never written a memoir before. In her seventies she thinks she ought to write one, but she needs a real writer's help. Jo wants the publicity Mimi can give her career, and when interviewed she likes Mimi's other assistant, but there's more to her story. She has reason to think Mimi is her great-aunt.

Mimi (originally Miriam) and her older sister Pamela, whom Jo calls Granny, are indeed sisters who've avoided each other for years. They were close; they've missed each other.

Their temperaments were different. Their parents had chosen gardening as a business and a lifestyle. Before "going back to the land" became a trend, the sisters' parents felt that their simple, frugal, rural life was part of their Christian faith. (This is back-story; living members of the family don't talk about their religion, if any. Though forgiveness is a major theme this is not a Sunday book.) Pamela was close to her parents and brother, and wanted to preserve her rustic introvert lifestyle as an adult. Mimi wanted to get out and be a socialite in the city. Both sisters got what they wanted; if that were all of their disagreement they could be happy seeing each other once or twice a year. As things are Pamela's never even told her child or grandchild that she had a sister.

It began, Mimi says, when both sisters liked the son of their clients, and he liked them....and she goes on with the three-generation saga of Jo's family, not consciously aware that Jo is part of that family. 

The ending is not altogether happy (clue: younger sister over seventy years old) but a family that's too nice to be divided, as this one's been, will be reconciled at the end. Not without Pamela, the quiet rural sister, having her chance to get in the last shocking word....

I enjoyed this novel. I came across just one British phrase that I had to google. Mimi remembers liking "Flakes in my Mr. Whippy." By "Flakes" she means Cadbury Flakes chocolate bars, which were made in a small size especially for tucking into "Mr. Whippy" or other forms of vanilla ice cream. The whole family are fond of food, both "healthy" and junk. If your book club chooses this book, everyone will have something to cook for the monthly book-theme buffet party. (A page of discussion questions is also provided for book clubs.)

Recommended to any adult reader who has, or had, or wanted to have a sibling. I wouldn't expect children to enjoy it but there's no serious violence or graphic sex to hide from them. Well done, Eve Chase, crafting a wholesome story that kept me interested through 52 chapters.

Book Review for 5.11.26: Love's Harvest

Title: Love's Harvest

Author: Linda Shenton Matchett

Date: 2018

Quote: "[Y]ou will lose your family's farm if you don't bring the outstanding loan up to date in sixty days."

Basil Quincey's father died and left Basil a mortgaged farm. Basil accepts the 1940s wartime offer of employing a bunkhouse full of "Land Girls," women who were sent around to do the chores of farmers who had gone to war. At their best the women are less efficient laborers than men. A Mrs. Hirsch is the slowest of all. Basil considers sending the whole troop back but there's something about Mrs. Hirsch...

What I received breaks off there. It's meant to be a trailer for a longer novel. This web site officially disapproves of the practice of sending people fragments of books. This book is not so delightfully written that anyone would want to linger over every word of Basil's impending romance with the widowed Mrs. Hirsch.

Book Review: The Cry of Her Heart

Title: The Cry of Her Heart

Author: Ora Smith

Publisher: Lighten

Date: 2020

Quote: "But your protector pays for your chastity."

In 1632, being the wrong kind of Protestant was a crime in England. Peninnah is in the Clink Prison, a real place, where prisoners were charged high prices for everything--including freedom from sexual abuse, not to mention time at a window facing the street where prisoners are allowed to beg for money to pay the high cost of being locked up. She can't afford to pay not to be raped. Somebody, she learns, is paying at least that price for her. 

Over the months in prison, during which she holds the baby after another prisoner dies in childbirth and develops some sympathy for the one woman on the women's side of the Clink who seems to belong in prison, Peninnah learns who her "protector" is. She had a crush on Robert Linnell, years ago, but he married another woman, She learns that that woman is dead. Her heart leaps, but she reminds herself that he wasn't interested in her when she was clean and pretty. Now she's dressed in rags and, unavoidably, infested with lice, and on page one she let her long red hair be chopped off as close to the scalp as possible to pay for a chance to beg.

All she can do is pray. When she finds Robert on the men's side of the Clink, she realizes that he can do nothing more than pray, too. This is the historical record, not a novel written to please modern readers; the main characters don't control their destiny in the way we might want them to do. It's up to God to hear the cry of Peninnah's heart. 

In historical fact, she thought God did. 

This is one of a series in which Ora Smith fleshes out what's known about Christian women of the past, including Pocahontas Rebecca Rolfe. The reality of their lives isn't always nice or politically correct. This book contains synopses of the books that came before it, so readers can decide which stories they want to read. 

Recommended to readers who are ready for historical novels that are more fact-based than the usual romantic stories.

Book Review: The Darling Buds of May

Title: The Darling Buds of May

Author: H.E. Bates

Date: 1958

Publisher: Curtis / Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: none

Length: 219 pages

Quote: “After distributing the eight ice creams—they were the largest vanilla, chocolate and raspberry super-bumpers, each in yellow, brown and almost purple stripes—Pop Larkin climbed up into the cab of the gentian-blue, home-painted thirty-hundredweight truck, laughing happily. ‘Perfick wevver!’”

It was often claimed in the 1950s that British Humour was too obscure and topical to be funny in other countries. The Darling Buds of May appears to be an example. I think the gross-outs grossly outweigh the laughs, but this is not a novel in which characters develop; it’s a rather violent satire on the changes in the British class system after the war. The Larkins don’t have to be tacky in a funny way. The mere idea of these tacky people emerging from the London slums to earn and spend obscene amounts of money, in tacky ways, is the joke.

There’s a plot, sort of. Mariette, the eldest of the six Larkin children, reports that she’s going to have a baby and has no idea who the father might be. This may just possibly be a trick, because an attractive young man, Sidney Charlton, tax collector, is in the neighborhood…and sure enough, he’s due to call on the Larkins, who never pay any taxes. The Larkins are migrant laborers, but they’re well paid. The landed gentry among whom they work are impoverished by having to pay income and property taxes, while the Larkins are paid cash every day, keep no records, spend their money as fast as they get it, and think their life is “perfick” if people just “use [their] loaf” (head) and live irresponsibly from day to day. The landed gentry might resent Pop Larkin enough to turn him in if he weren’t constantly treating them to party foods, cocktails, and in some cases illicit erotic thrills that their “background” would not allow them to get for themselves. Charlton is supposed to gather evidence for the prosecution of Pop Larkin, but instead he lets the Larkins seduce him into their lifestyle of carnality.

If you were one of the people who resented people like Larkin it’s probably terribly, caustically funny. If you think the blame belongs to the Welfare State for not allowing the gentry their chance to teach Larkin about the benefits of temperance, it’s sort of funny, too; I chortled. If you like the kind of escape fiction where everybody has fun and nobody gets badly hurt, you might enjoy The Darling Buds of May. If you believe that fictional sinners ought to be punished, you won’t like this novel at all…in fact I acquired it because a censorious library-goer in North Carolina hated it enough to damage my copy. Let’s just say that the Larkins, father and daughter, get off much, much easier than moralists would say they deserve.

Book Review: Three Men in a Boat

Title: Three Men in a Boat

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

Date: 1889, 1957

Publisher: Penguin (1957)

ISBN: none

Length: 185 pages

Quote: “George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone. Other works may excel this in depth of thought...but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it.”

Was that one of the jokes? Who can say? This is a plausible story of three Victorian English gentlemen, and a dog, on vacation in a rowboat.

Jerome K. Jerome was another of those English humorists whose jokes are accessible to American readers. By current standards his jokes may be on the long and indirect side. He spends a page or two describing a scene in the favorite clichés of Romanticist novels and essays, the river singing the little song it’s sung so many thousand years and our thoughts half sad, half sweet, and so on, and then throws in a chunk of “incurable veracity”: “Harris said: ‘How about when it rained?’”

If you want to laugh out loud, Jerome will help. If you don’t...this may not be an ideal book for reading in school.

Many funny things were written in the nineteenth century, although too many comic writers felt a need to make it clear that they were joking by writing in tedious “dialect,” which could not ever have been much fun to read. Why has Three Men in a Rowboat worn so much better than Artemus Ward (I made a samizdat copy of his collected works, with standard spelling, and it’s still pretty funny) or Orpheus C. Kerr (a satire, superficially in favor of expanding government, in the voice of a fictive office seeker) or the other books and writers sampled in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor? Possibly because Jerome’s thought was ahead of his time. Several passages, though written in Victorian English words, sound like something you might read or watch on television today.

“The first list we made out had to be discarded...the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things...George said... ‘We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things we can’t do without.’...with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up that boat...with a store of foolish things which they think essential...but which are really only useless lumber. How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with...expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation...It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard.”

“I...told them that they had better leave the whole matter entirely to me. They fell into the suggestion with a readiness that had something uncanny about it; George put on  a pipe...and Harris...lit a cigar. This was hardly what I intended. What I had meant, of course, was that I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about under my directions.”

“That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings...I do not admire it myself...even my landlady herself...excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up...with its tail broken...and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round and admire it...and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.”

And so on. And the message of the story...readers probably wouldn’t have said it has one, if Jerome hadn’t said in his introduction that it has...the message of Three Men in a Boat was a sort of introduction to a large part of the advertising we see now.

The three men and dog spend ten fine long summer days on the Thames and are then glad to go back to their jobs, just like yuppies today. The concept of a summer vacation was new in the nineteenth century. Schools closed in summer, and all right-minded students undoubtedly looked forward to the long summer break between terms, but parents and teachers had agreed to schedule this break so that students could help harvest crops. Traditionally everyone old enough to work had been expected to work at least ten hours a day, six days a week, and give thanks that in Europe and North America employers were expected to concede either Sundays or Saturdays as days of rest. (In Muslim countries only Friday morning was so reserved; after services at the mosque, people had to go back to work.) 

The Industrial Age offered the ideal of equalizing at least the proportions of labor and leisure time among rich and poor people. Jerome’s generation fretted about the impending “problem of leisure”: if the working class had to work only eight hours a day, apparently they would need to be “educated” to use all that free time on something other than getting drunk, oversleeping, and having too many children. The idea of vacation travel was developed to address the urban middle class’s growing awareness that living in crowded cities was bad for their health. Hence the opening scene, in Three Men in a Boat, where the three men (who identify as “young” and are obviously healthy) complain of feeling “bad,” “run down,” and having all the symptoms mentioned in an ad for over-the-counter medicine. People who had been taught that “Wilful Waste Makes Woeful Want” weren’t likely to get into “vacationing” until they’d been convinced that they needed a change of pace, for their health.

The message? “Be a good writer, and eventually someone will pay you to take a vacation trip and write about it.”

Meet the Blog Roll: Ann Mackie Miller

This web site now has three series of posts on Thursdays: Meet the Blog Roll, Frugal Basics, and Dinner for Two for Less than Ten Dollars. Which comes next? You decide which to sponsor. All three series are sponsored by readers. 

For today, it is Meet the Blog Roll: Ann Mackie Miller, whose blog is "British Birds" at 

https://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/

It's not been updated recently because it's pretty well filled. This blog gave me the mental model for my butterfly posts--only it consists only of bird articles, no link logs or book reviews or other fun stuff found here. Each article could be a chapter in a field guide, with clear, beautiful bird photos and facts about the birds' lives. If you are not British and have ever seen a reference to a bird in a British book and wondered what kind of bird the author meant, this web site will show you.

As with butterflies, several British species are found on both sides of the Channel and a few are found on both sides of the Atlantic. Many are considered close relatives of eastern North American species, having evolved only slight differences; some might be able to hybridize. Some, like the Mute Swan, Starling, and English Sparrow, were intentionally imported from Britain to North America. Some, like the Robin, aren't related, don't look much alike, and have similar names because British immigrants seem to have wanted to give familiar names to some sort of creature they found in North America. 

The British Birds blog may be more like a book-in-progress than like a typical blog, but those who enjoy birds will enjoy reading it. Its posts never really go out of date.

Some favorites:

https://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/2015/08/pictures-of-birds-grey-heron.html

Great Blue Herons became the icon for the Chesapeake Bay and efforts to keep the water that flow into it clean. So they are among my favorite birds--in my top hundred list, anyway. We used to think they were solitary creatures, only ever seen by ones. We've learned, as some specific kinds of pollution have been reduced, that herons are as solitary as they need to be. They are obligate carnivores who are built to catch prey in what seems a peculiar, inefficient way, so they spread themselves out enough during the day that each bird can find enough fish and shore creatures to survive. At the end of the day, family groups gather in a favorite tree. It has to be a large tree, for herons to roost in it, and as it will probably be grossly over-fertilized it's unlikely to last long. Anyway they "talk" to one another, and sometimes even "kiss" with their long sharp bills. North America's Great Blue Herons are different from Britain's Grey Herons and the Caribbean Islands' Cocoy Herons, but their ancestors may have been one species and, conceivably, their descendants might some day be considered one speies again.

https://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/2015/04/canada-geese-and-goslings.html

Same species, and what adorable close-ups of the fluffy little goslings! Canada geese are fun to watch. They may all look alike to humans, but they clearly relate to one another as individuals. Couples bond and mate for life; extended family groups divide into nuclear family units while raising their young, then merge back into big flocks in winter. Some migrate and some don't. The return of the migrating family members to a favorite lake is always an occasion of much happy excitement. During the winter younger birds pair off. A flock of Canada geese often picks up a few geese of different species, and these become part of the extended family. These bold birds don't seem to mind being watched by humans as their babies grow up, but if you come too close they'll "goose" your knees. From their perspective, a golf course is a sad waste of a nice lake, to be discouraged by every means possible. They are, however, pretty good mowers and weeders of ordinary grassy fields.

And, of course...

https://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/2015/01/meet-long-tailed-tits.html

It's not the little birds' fault that a name intended to sound like a noisee they make happened to sound like "teat" in English. As a result Internet wits are always using "tit pics!" as a come-on and displaying pictures of small gray birds. Britain has a few different species of tits. North America has one, in the West; in most places we have to get by with chickadees, nuthatches, and juncos. Tits not only don't produce milk, but consume it. Britain's blue tits worked out a way to pick the tops off British milk bottles in the mid-twentieth century.

Book Review: The Mystery of the Cupboard

Title: The Mystery of the Cupboard

Author: Lynne Reid Banks

Date: 1993

Publisher: Morrow

ISBN: 0-688-12138-1

Length: 246 pages

Illustrations: pencil drawings by Tom Newsom

Quote: “She was some kind of actress back around the time of the First World War. Going on the stage in those days was considered fairly wicked.”

This is the concluding volume of a four-book series about a little boy called Omri whose toys come to life when locked in the magic cupboard. He’s still a little boy, but he’s become quite mature through his relationships with his miniature adults, including the soldiers. Omri has, however, observed only the most family-filtered effects of his toys’ sexuality, as when a miniature man turns out to have a wife and child. Now he’s old enough to learn about the effects of sex by discovering the long-hidden diaries of his “wicked” aunt, who made the cupboard magic.

Reviews of books that were published in sequence usually say that it’s possible to enjoy this book without reading the ones that came before it. In the case of The Mystery of the Cupboard I’m not sure that that’s true. There’s a lot of back-story behind this novel. Moreover, the series reads as if it were written for one or more growing children: The Indian in the Cupboard was a story for middle school students, but The Mystery of the Cupboard is much more of a story for adults who still enjoy whimsy enough to want to know how the author tied up the loose ends from The Indian in the Cupboard. I’d think twice about handing volume four of this series to the average child who’d enjoyed volume one. 

Book Review: Silent Night

Title: Silent Night

Author: E.C. Myatt

Date: 2025

Quote: "It's been a journey I've been looking forward to, returning to my family home the old-fashioned way."

Sophie, a sophisticate who's dumped a long-term boyfriend just because she can, decides to go home for Christmas on the train and meets an attractive man. She finds him attractive enough that she tells him where to find her family and suggests that he drop in for Boxing Day. To her surprise, he does.

Readers are left to wonder whether Sophie is capable of feeling anything about either Romantic Love or Christmas, and just determined to be thoroughly modern and British about it...or not. I suspect the computer did more than its share of the writing of this book. But it's a clean, realistic Christmas romance.

Book Review: White Swan

Title: White Swan

Author: E.G. Ellory

Date: 2025

Quote: "I'm...hunting down a person known only as White Swan...somewhere in Moscow."

Solomon Stone is off on another adventure in espionage. Retirement is not an option for him. He'll be rewarded with promotions, but he's trapped in his life of cloak-and-dagger, kill-or-be-killed, tests of his wits against those of strangers. He tries not to think about it much. He needs his brainpower for tracking down people like the White Swan, whoever that turns out to be. 

You know Solomon Stone is going to find the White Swan. The suspense is about what's going to happen when he does. Will the White Swan be a man or a woman? Must the White Swan be killed, or taken back to some sort of other authorities? How will Stone know? 

I don't feel qualified to judge spy fiction and did not, in fact, ask to be an advance reader for this installment. For those who like this kind of thing, it's a short, straightforward installment in a series. This is the sixth short book about Solomon Stone; by now fans probably know they want it. 

Book Review: Mariana

Book Review: Mariana

Author: Monica Dickens

Date: 1940 (U.K.), 1968 (U.S.)

Publisher: Michael Joseph (U.K.), Penguin (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 283 pages

Quote: “Mary sometimes heard people say: ‘I can’t bear to be alone.’”

The heroine of Monica Dickens’ Mariana is called Mary. There’s a reason: people her age were not actually named Mariana. The name was well known, but it was considered unlucky, associated with the lovelorn character in Tennyson’s poem: “‘He will not come!’ she said...‘I am a-weary, weary, I wish that I were dead.’” Just in case anybody didn’t recall the poem, it’s quoted in the novel.

Mary is alone. Her husband, an officer in the British navy, was on a ship that has just sunk. She’s never minded being alone while he was out, but this is a real crisis, and her whole life flashes before her eyes...forming a novel in the biographical mode. My feeling is that Mary’s life has been commonplace, but somebody out there may find her interesting.

Although Charles Dickens’ great-granddaughter was young at the time of writing, Mariana was not autobiography. Her husband was an officer in the U.S. navy. (Interestingly, the preface to the 1968 edition calls her “Mrs. Dickens” before mentioning, further down the same page, that she was actually Mrs. Stratton, formerly Miss Dickens.)

Book Review: Peacock Pie

Book Review: Peacock Pie

Author: Walter de la Mare

Date: 1913, 1975

Publisher: Unwin (U.K.), Faber & Faber (U.S.)

ISBN: 0-571-04683-5

Length: 115 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Edward Ardizzone

Quote: “Slowly, silently, now the moon / Walks the night in her silver shoon...”

The publication data for this book says a lot about its success. According to my 1975 copy, Peacock Pie was “First published 1913...Edition illustrated by W. Hearth Robinson, first published 1916. Edition illsutrated by C. Lovat Fraser, first published 1924...Edition illustrated by Jocelyn Crowe, first published 1936. Edition illustrated by F.R. Emett, first published in September 1941...This edition, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, first published 1946...”

Poems that were very effective for child audiences a hundred years ago aren’t always equally effective now, though many of the poems are deliciously spooky. Some of the poems in Peacock Pie are real classics, like the silver moonlight landscape quoted above. Some need just a little explanation...

                A poor old Widow in her weeds

                Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds...

                And now all summer she sits and sews

                Where willow-herb, comfrey, and bugloss blows...

Some are vocabulary challenges for most picture-book readers:

                The sandy cat by the Farmer’s chair

                Mews at his knee for dainty fare...

                Dobbin at manger pulls his hay:

                Gone is another summer’s day.

Some describe things today’s children aren’t forced to know about:

                Poor blind Tam, the beggar man,

                I’ll give a penny to as soon as I can.

Some merely hint at things nostalgia buffs prefer to forget. “Poor tired Tim! It’s sad for him” sounds like a taunt to be recited when a normal healthy child is feeling sleepy or sluggish, as it might be from staying up too late...but the drawing shows that Edward Ardizzone visualized the chronically tired child as starving.

De la Mare meant these poems to appeal to imagination. They will, if children understand them at all. They will definitely entice children into a different sort of world. However, it’s possible that Peacock Pie would be better appreciated as a nostalgic gift to an adult than as a picture book for a beginning reader. Children are most likely to appreciate this book if adults read the poems to them. 

Book Review: Wedding Day Brews

Title: Wedding Day Brews

Author: Bella Colby

Date: 2023

Publisher: Beresford

ISBN: 978-1-913422-14-1

Quote: "My dog was talking to me. To passers-by it sounds like he whines a lot, but I understand every word he says."

Skye, a Scottish witch or psychic as seen on "Charmed," had mixed feelings about returning to the British coastal town that caught her eye. After her divorce she'd become involved with an environmentalist group but the terms of having charges dropped, after she helped sink a ship, specified that she stay in the UK for two years. She'll need a job, of course. Applying for the first job she's told about, she's passed over in favor of somebody's obnoxious niece, then finds the said niece dead in the parking lot. 

Skye has been to witch school but used only one spell even there. She'll use her spell, and rely on protection by her familiar dog, while solving the mystery but she will use logic, not magic, to find out whodunit. It's a fairly short, simple plot; if you guess whodunit (I did), there's still the suspense of finding out how Skye can prove it.  

This series was published in Britain before ChatGPT, and is much better written than the series-opening short mysteries I've been receiving since. I don't think Colby is really trying to write like Joan Aiken, Mary Stewart, or Peter Dickinson, but her voice may appeal to people who miss theirs. 

Book Review: The Duke Next Door

Title: The Duke Next Door

Author: Kristina Earl

Date: 2024

Quote: "For your sake, I shall designate a portion of my property as a refuge, where animals may dwell undisturbed."

And so farewell to suspense. In his first speech, Edward Somerset, the fictional duke whose estates adjoin those of Elizabeth Hamilton's father the earl, makes it clear that he really likes Elizabeth no matter how much they've bickered all through their early lives. All that remains to be seen is how Edward and Elizabeth will settle their past disagreements and get to the happily-ever-after stage of this sweet romance. A really repulsive marquess, and a duel offstage, will be involved. 

Jane Austen did this sort of thing ever so much better, but her life was tragically short and her fans have been doing it, as best they could, ever since. If this story lacks Austen's firsthand familiarity with the period and command of its nuances, at least it's good, as all competent Regency Romances are, for a quick mental trip to a time and place that was far from innocent but that was so different from our time and place that its nasty aspects seem almost benign. This fun, short read should offer a nice mental break through an hour or so, total, of waiting room or commuter bus time.

Book Review: Puppy Peril

Title: Puppy Peril 

Author: Hazel Smith

Date: 2025

Quote: "Monty...was already past her knees, and, at the rate he was growing, he'd outweigh her soon."

Maid Ivy, who was brought up by grandparents who ran a cleaning service and just loves to keep everything clean, has adopted the Great Dane who will be her companion in later adventures. She's been hired by the La Fontaine Hotel, where the first published book in her series took place, but has yet to start work there. To fill the days between being hired and going to work, she volunteers to clean a local animal shelter. She becomes acquainted with lots of quirky, likable older people. She also finds a dead body on the street...and evidence of a dognapping operation. Is it possible that the two things are connected?

Partial spoiler: Monty will lead Ivy and us readers into the foul core of the dognapper's den, the hidden side animal rescuers can have. And my suspension of disbelief was jiggled. When people Go Wrong, they can of course go altogether wrong. Someone who is humane toward mongrels, Chihuahuas, and Great Danes can run a horrible puppy mill breeding stolen pit bulls and selling them to people who want to sell tickets to dogfights. But isn't it more common in real life that people who Go Wrong make small compromises, that a person who wants to support a shelter for other kinds of dogs might be breeding stray pit bulls for resale and telling perself that at least the dogs are humanely treated while they're in per care--and that individuals who take responsibility for a lot of animals are most likely to disappoint the animals because money or illness prevents their doing what they need to do? Well...the puppy mill person in this book is a unique character. Such people exist in the real world but they are, mercifully, unusual.

I might have been happier with a different plot but I enjoyed spending a few more hours with Monty and Ivy. So, if you like a mystery where one murder can be solved by observation without waiting for it to become a series, where the pretty girl is more interested in work than in sex, where the dog is part of the plot without having any supernatural powers, will you. 

Book Review: Lights Camera Murder at the Castle

Title: Lights Camera Murder at the Castle

Author: Avery Kent

Date: 2025

Quote: "[A] whole two weeks of filming here! With a complete takeover of the castle..."

The fictional Castle Frobisher has been rented to the cast and crew of a TV series. Producer Don, or Donald, or Donahue, Sullivan, or Sully, is a certifiable bunghole. Everyone else has reasons to hate him so the only questions are when someone will write him permanently out of the show and how Kitty McCray and the other castle residents will prove whodunit. 

If you think a good mystery novel needs a murder, but a good detective ought to be able to solve one murder without waiting for the murderer to make it a series, then this and the other planned and actual "Castle mysteries" ought to be precisely your cup of tea. 

My review copy contained a few things that may have been cleared up in the final published copy. (The same character is described as "tall" in one scene and "small" in another. I used to know a gifted actress, and that was how people described her, so this gave me a vivid impression of the character. Still, when the victim has been stabbed in the back it might be relevant to the plot to know whether a character is 5'2" and good at towering over people or 5'10" and good at looking up to them, or maybe 5'6" and capable of both.) 

It's an entertaining story, in any case. I think my favorite scene is the one where the characters agree that, though shocked by the murder, they're all glad that Don's gone. Then there's the one where Lord Frobisher, who as an aristocrat can afford to flout any and all stereotypes, starts reminiscing about the traditional cross-dressing comedies his and Kitty's schools used to stage and decided to cross-dress again for old times' sake. He's not trying to cheer up the TV people; he's ignoring them and behaving like himself in his own home. And there's the cat shown on the cover, and also a dog, who gambol through the scenes and occasionally call attention to a clue...

Book Review: Busman's Honeymoon

Title: Busman’s Honeymoon

Author: Dorothy Sayers

Date: 1937

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-080823-3

Length: 370 pages

Quote: “Peter Wimsey is married—yes, actually married—to that extraordinary young woman...Peter must be forty-five if he’s a day.”

A “busman’s holiday” was a leisure trip in the bus. In this volume of their adventures Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey find themselves solving a murder mystery on their honeymoon.

Sayers had already explained the rule under which, upon marriage to Lord Peter, Harriet Vane acquired the title “Lady Peter” rather than, more logically, Lady Harriet. Possibly the off-putting sound of this title has something to do with the fact that she remains plain Harriet to herself and her friends.

Anyway, she’d helped Lord Peter solve a few other cases since he proved her innocent of the murder of her ex-boyfriend, and now they’re full partners in crime—solving them, that is. Those who’ve found Partners-for-Life will appreciate this fictional rendition of something rare and wonderful. This couple’s passion for each other is matched only by their passion for solving murder mysteries. If it makes them the most eccentric aristocrats in England, it may make them the happiest. The joy they feel at this time in their lives would probably have sustained them if their first detective adventure as a married couple had involved gruesome murders, but, perhaps out of compassion for readers, Sayers gives them a case distinguished by its cleanness.

Sayers, a Christian, never gave Lord Peter Wimsey the emotional comfort of religion. (He’s had a Christian education, has clergymen as friends, and goes around quoting Christian literature, but he lost any faith in a “personal” God in the trenches in the 1914 war.) In her mind the only really religious, as distinct from cultural, Christian element in her detective stories was that she refused to “cheapen life” by inventing unlovable stick figures who exist only to be murdered. In her novels Lord Peter’s whimsical mind, always dredging up quotes and fun facts, always guarantees a Comedy element; his empathy for the victims always guarantees a Tragedy element; and his relationship with unaccountably coy Harriet—who didn’t want to be accused of marrying him for his money, but in this volume we learn that her ex-boyfriend had also conditioned her not to like sex—added a Romance. 

We have here, therefore, a Tragedy, a Comedy, a Romance, and a Mystery, all in one volume, and the last thing Sayers would have wanted was for anyone to mistake this four-genre triumph for a Christian Novel as well. She thought of her detective stories as potboilers that subsidized the relatively smaller stack of religious writing she found time to do. Nevertheless she worked them out with all the joy of duty and pleasure that she described in The Mind of the Maker, and that she gives to Peter and Harriet—and it shows. If you like novels at all, you just about have to like Busman’s Honeymoon.

Book Review: Dead and Buried

Title: Dead and Buried

Author: E.G. Ellory

Date: 2025

Quote: "A convicted killer had been released after thirty-eight years behind bars."

And he's coming back to Fenburne--the place he knows, of course, and also the place where the older people know him. Where several people want him dead, and some would quite enjoy beating him to death. Where his role in some unsolved murders, and the whereabouts of the bodies, remain to be discovered from the secrets people thought were long dead and buried. 

This is volume three in the Fenburne murder mystery series. Readers are likely to know Sam Hyatt, who is officially retired (and who helped, early in his career, to imprison the serial murderer), and his buddy Jodie Walsh, who's spent two volumes first coming to terms with her attraction to Hannah and then making sure that Hannah is a lesbian too. Will they ever become a couple? What brought Hannah to Fenburne, anyway? Is she someone Walsh wants to get involved with? Will Hyatt's married daughter, who is about Jodie's age, be in danger? What about Hyatt's contemporaries, a few of whom are still on the police force? We're told that the serial murderer wants not to kill again, although he's planning to take advantage of some harmless retired people for money; will he have killed, be killed, or neither, when the first recent murder brings Hyatt and Walsh into action as detectives?

I find Ellory's type of mysteries more satisfactory than the grim and gory "hard-boiled" subgenre or the bland and often too easy "cozies," Because the atmosphere of this series is the kind of thing Arthur Conan Doyle, or Dorothy Sayers, or early Agatha Christie used to write, perhaps, what I like about the book also drew my attention to what I didn't like so much. Writers are often advised to "show not tell" when writing fiction. The proportion of showing to telling in this novel is high--and I kept thinking that Doyle or Sayers or Christie might have jotted down all that author's voice stuff in their outline-and-suchlike or even their first drafts, but they would have thought of a way to show the information via action or at least conversation when they sent their manuscripts to the publisher. Is it worth picking at this, when Ellory has a following of fans who don't mind it? Yes. I think Ellory is one of the self-published authors who are worth encouraging to develop their talent, to write as well as the masters of their genres. 

Book Review: Cursed Bones of Sergeant Boom

Title: The Cursed Bones of Sergeant Boom!

Author: Inka York

Date: 2023

Publisher: Inklore

Quote: "Despite the dog's small stature, and indeed despite his death and decay, he was still in possession of a mighty, rumbling bark..."

That's Sergeant Boom! (the exclamation mark is part of his name to make his gravestone easy to identify, though he doesn't seem to stay buried in it).

A character in this story visits the grave of Douglas Adams, presumably seeking inspiration. I can't say that this novel shows much. It's part of a series constructed from all the occult elements usually omitted from whimsical witch and vampire stories. All of the main characters are undead in one way or another; this is another fantasy/mystery where solving the mystery requires readers to keep track of who's able to do what. Some are long-undead British monarchs. Some can only send out feeble thought waves; some have bodies solid enough for mating or fighting. 

Both of the couples are male. There are no heterosexual couples or romances in this book. There's a daughter, now 130 years old, looking 30, and still bratty, and a sister, and passing reference to a wife who's not active in the story. Basically this is a story for men who are interested almost exclusively in other men.

I didn't laugh out loud, though a few throwaway references to history and literature did strike me as  mildly funny, or at least punny. (The homosexual characters don't indulge their emotions in the stereotypical "leave me alone, I'm insane but harmless" way, but one of the undead monarchs is indeed a "screaming queen." The main character is called Kane and his home base is a store called Kane & Fable.) I don't expect even its intended audience will rate this series up there with the works of Adams, Pratchett, or Neil Gaiman, but if you've collected all the novels of the dead British comic novelists of our time and are waiting impatiently for the next one from the surviving novelist, you might smile over this series.