Tag Archives: 20 Books of Summer

Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders – 20 Books of Summer

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Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders is a continuation of E. Nesbit’s book Five Children and It.  This book was first published in 2014.

It begins with a prologue set in London in 1905.  Cyril, Anthea, Jane, Robert and the Lamb had found the Psammead, a sand fairy, a desert god from the times before the ancient Egyptians. He’s a  cantankerous brown furry grump with a small stout body, eyes on stalks and long arms and legs, he usually lives in hot sand and any hint of dampness near him causes him terrible pain. He had been sleeping for years but the children decide to wake him up, the Psammead has the power to grant wishes. They ask him to take them to the future, somwehere quite near, and they end up in 1930, in the home of their old friend the Professor where they see some photos of themselves as they will be as adults, but they aren’t all in the photos, it’s a bit of a puzzle. Of course the older children are just the correct age to be involved in the First World War, and the Psammead whisks some of them to the Western Front.

I’m usually not all that mad keen on continuations written by a different author, but I think this idea really works, inevitably it is a bit sad, but realistic.

At one point (chapter 10) the children and the Psammead go to see the play Peter Pan. The Psammead is thrilled by it, especially when the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies. I was almost as thrilled as the Psammead. J.M. Barrie is a much underrated author nowadays.

You can read  Linda Buckley-Archer’s review of the book in The Guardian here.

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar – 20 Books of Summer

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The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar was first published in 2018 and I think I’ve had it since then, waiting to be read, it’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. I must admit that I did have a few qualms at times about this book but I ended up really enjoying it. The qualms were because I’m one of those people that prefers to have the bedroom action in books staying in the bedroom with the reader staying on the other side of the door.

The book is set in 1785/86 and Jonah Hancock is a merchant and ship owner, he’s waiting for word of one of his ships to reach him, it’s always a fraught time as so many ships are wrecked and never heard of again. This time his ship has not arrived but its captain Tysoe Jones has, telling Jonah that he has sold his ship so that he could buy a ‘mermaid’. Jonah is dumbfounded but Tysoe explains that the oddity will make him a fortune as people will pay good money to see a mermaid. In truth it’s a dried up and ugly impish thing, but Tysoe is correct and people come from far and wide to see it.

Jonah Hancock had led a quiet and blameless  life for almost twenty years since his wife’s death in childbirth along with his baby son, but he is now catapulted into high society, a place of sex, sin and debauchery. Very young women are exploited by older women, who sell their bodies to wealthy men but the girls get nothing except clothes, board and lodging.

So bawds and bawdy houses feature in this book, some quirky but believable characters, and some problems which are still with us nowadays. The exploitation of young women, by other women as well as men. This was a good read though.

 

 

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – 20 Books of Summer

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Snow Country by Yasanuri Kawabata was first published in 1956. The Penguin Modern Classic which I read was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. It’s a short read at just 121 pages.

Shimamura is a married man and has children, he’s a wealthy man, he inherited his money and is in the habit of leaving the city and travelling to the west coast mountains of Japan, where winter arrives early. He’s travelling there by train and he recognises Yoko by her reflection on his window. She’s a part time geisha and it transpires that she had chosen that profession as her fiance is seriously ill, and she needs to pay for his medical care. The young man is travelling with her and Yoko is tending to him wrapping him up against the cold, he looks seriously ill.

It’s another geisha that Shimamura has come to see though. He believes he’s in love with Komako, she’s very quiet and demure and really not at all the sort of woman who you would expect to become a geisha, hired out every day to entertain strange men at parties – and more. I imagine that a Japanese reader would get much more out of the book than I did, although the translation seems faultless with no clunky bits. There are lots of mentions of moths and apparently they signify the non permanence and transient nature of life – according to Google!  I suppose that is what the book is about. There are some lovely descriptions in it, which I always enjoy in any book.

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, this was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee.

 

 

 

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud was first published in 2014, by Bloomsbury. I had meant to read this book when it first came out, not ten years later. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

It’s well known I think that Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh moved from Glasgow to Suffolk when his career in architecture had ground to a halt.  As World War One progressed they got into trouble with the authorities as some of the locals decided that the strange couple with the odd accent (Scottish) must be spies. Esther Freud has woven a story around them, embroidering what had happened to them there and how it impacted on them, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Maggs, a young boy with a damaged foot, something that he has in common with CRM.

Thomas lives on the Suffolk coast, his father is a publican, he’s abusive as a father and husband, and of course he has a drink problem, so Thomas doesn’t have a good relationship with him. When Mackintosh and his wife arrive in the area Thomas is attracted to the couple who show an interest in his own drawings and befriend him.

The Mackintoshes have money problems and Mac can’t even sell his exquisitely painted botanical art, never mind get architecture commissions, to make matters worse there are problems within Margaret’s family so she has to be away in Glasgow at times.

I enjoyed this one although it is tinged with sadness as the war takes its toll of the locals. There’s some lovely writing, descriptions of flowers, scenery and seascapes.  But as you would expect The Glasgow School of Art also features and in the author’s acknowledgements at the end of the book she adds her own ‘heartfelt appreciation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service for the skill, courage and determination they showed in overcoming the blaze that raged through the Glasgow School of Art just as this book was going to press.’

Of course fire came back again for a second bite of that building, such a tragedy. The remains, just a shell, are still wrapped in plastic, waiting for some sort of decision. It’s a deeply depressing sight.

 

 

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson – 20 Books of Summer

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Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson  is another of my 20 Books of Summer although it wasn’t on my original list which has had to be amended somewhat. This one was a request from the library.

It begins in 1919 in fictional Hazelbourne-on-Sea in the south of England. It’s a tough time for women as those who have been working during the war are having to give up their jobs so that the returning soldiers can have them. Constance Haverhill finds herself surplus to requirements at her family home as her parents are dead, her brother has inherited the farm and his wife doesn’t want Constance around. The estate where Constance worked during the war have got rid of her which means she is homeless as well as jobless, she’s lucky to have found work as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a hotel.

The hotel is a popular meeting place for Poppy Wirrall, she’s the daughter of a baronet and during the war she and a group of women had flown aeroplanes from factories to the airfields. Now they can only drive motorbikes, they’ve set up a taxi company for women only, with sidecars for the passengers.

This was a good read. It features lots of the social problems that came with the end of World War 1. The lack of men for women to marry as so many had been killed in the war, the horror of severely damaged men both physically and mentally,  the problem of suddenly having no work for women after they had become used to being wage earners throughout the war years, and then the new laws which favoured the returning soldiers.

That makes it all sound a bit grim but there is some romance and light-heartedness in there too. This is the third book by Simonson that I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed them all, I’ve just had a look at my blogpost of her second book Before the War and I ended it by writing:

Snobbery, racism, prejudice, bitchiness, family strife – all the usual nastiness that goes to make up almost any society of human beings in fact – appear in each of Helen Simonson’s books.

That’s true of this one as well.

 

Gideon Ahoy! by William Mayne – 20 Books of Summer

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Gideon Ahoy! by William Mayne was published in 1987. Gideon is a teenager and he’s profoundly deaf, so he doesn’t have much in the way of speech. He seems to be mentally handicapped but he would probably be described as being severely autistic nowadays. The whole household revolves around Gideon who makes a lot of noise which of course he can’t hear. His younger sister Eva gets somewhat neglected because of the situation, not that she minds. There are also two  younger children, called Tansy and Mercury. Their mother has a hard life because she’s more or less a one parent family, the father is in the Merchant Navy and spends most of his time away at sea.

Gideon gets a job working on a canal barge, he’s good at the work and is popular with the people who pay to go on the boat trips, but it’s a mystery what happenes to his pay. He never brings any home although his employer pays him.  Gideon’s confidence rises and the atmosphere in the family begins to improve, although Tansy and Mercury are still a handful, brimful of energy. But it turns out that Gideon’s job is just for the summer and he can’t understand that the barge isn’t used in the cold months.

This is a lovely story with a happy ending, just what I needed really.

Apparently William Mayne was convicted of child abuse and his books have been removed from libraries and possibly even most bookshops but I bought my copy of this book in a secondhand bookshop in Callander, Stirlingshire, and when I bought it the woman said, ah that’s a lovely book. I don’t know if she knew of the history of William Mayne. However it set me thinking. Are some authors ‘too big’ to be cancelled the way some banks or companies are deemed to be too big to be allowed to fail?

I’ve always wondered why Gary Glitter’s records have been cancelled but Michael Jackson’s are still played regularly on the radio and TV.

Likewise William Mayne’s books have been removed from shelves but Alice Munro is still feted despite her husband admitting that he sexually abused her daughter from the age of nine for years, and she blamed her daughter instead of getting rid of her husband, the girl’s step-father.  You can read about it in a Guardian article here.  I find that more shocking.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers was first published in 1935 and it was a re-read for me, for at least the third time. The first time I read it was in the late 1970s. I think this one might be a love or hate book as I’ve realised over the years that some people hate it. I think they think that Sayer’s writing is pretentious because she did write quite a lot of quotes, bits of poems. I still love it and I’ve decided to re-read the other Lord Peter Wimsey books soon, in order this time. He probably annoys some readers, I just think he is funny and I’m pretty sure she modelled him and his ‘man’ Bunter on Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves.

Anyway, the setting is mainly a women’s college in Oxford where Harriet Vane has gone to do some academic research. Shrewsbury is her old college so she knows some of the staff. Not all is well though, some of the staff and students have been receiving poison pen letters, and they think that as Harriet writes detective novels she might be able to get to the bottom of it all.

Things escalate though and even Harriet is targeted with letters, grafitti appears, there’s vandalism, destruction of academic work and all sorts of nastiness going on. Harriet decides that she needs help from Lord Peter, but he is out of the country and uncontactable.

Meanwhile she meets Peter’s nephew for the first time and he doesn’t realise that Harriet is completely in the dark about large parts of Peter’s life, he’s far from being the sybaritic poseur and posh twit that she thought him to be. When he’s out of the country he’s on important government business. Harriet begins to revise her feelings about Peter.

In a weird way this is my comfort read, – well – that and du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Do you have a comfort read that you turn to now and again? My mother-in-law’s was Gone with the Wind, but I am never going to go to that one.

 

Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace was published in 1960. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. I had only just read a review of a Doreen Wallace book when this one popped up in a secondhand bookshop, otherwise I may not have bought it, but I’m glad that I did.

The setting is East Anglia, the Sculpher family makes a living from travelling around farms and woodlands of the area, cutting down any trees that the landowners want to be felled. It’s difficult work and the young women of the family are expected to do their fair share of felling too. They all live in ‘vans’ and the younger ones sleep under them, it’s a tough and spartan life.  One of the daughters is apt to lie down in a ditch with any man she can find, and those children are just seen as part of the future workforce by their grandfather. But one night Maud, another daughter doesn’t come home, she has legged it with one of the gentry. Sculpher is incensed.

The focus switches to Mayland Hall where Daniel and Mary Gooderham live.  The Sculphers do occasional work for them. The Gooderhams are ‘county’ people, an ‘old’ family and well-respected. They don’t have a huge amount of ready money but over the years they have built up more and more stocks of land, so they are land wealthy. In their society primogeniture rules, but Daniel’s elder brother had died in World War 2. He had been the one to get the expensive education while younger brothers just went to the local school. Apparently any daughters were also sent to expensive schools, to make them more likely to find a wealthy husband in the future! Janey, the daughter-in-law has cousins who are ‘honourables’ like the Mitfords and it has gone to her head, she’s a horror.

This was a good read, full of social history now as it is 64 years since it was written. It features the Gooderhams worrying about the new Death Tax when Daniel dies, and what they had to do to avoid it. This was something that a Labour government had brought in, in an effort to redistribute wealth. It reminded me that the Death Tax is often mentioned in Angela Thirkell’s books too.

The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon was first published in 1955, it is illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. This book won the Carnegie Medal.

There’s an Author’s Note at the beginning of this book, she explains that the house she grew up in was filled with books everywhere but there was one room which was called The Bookroom which housed ‘a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below’. There was so much dust in that room it made her eyes smart, but it was still her favourite place to be. I must say that the whole house sounds like a wonderful place to grow up in.

Anyway, this is a book of charming short stories, suitable for children of all ages. some of them feel quite traditional in the fairly tale mode, and others are really different. I can see why it won the Carnegie Medal in 1955.

I’m doing well with 20 Books of Summer. I’ve read 14 so far, but still have four or five to review.

Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer – 20 Books of Summer

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Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was first published in 1929.

Eustacia has never been to school before, her father had been a professor of Greek and her mother a doctor, they had not made a good job of bringing her up, and by the time she was a teenager she was a rather superior little prig.

When both of her parents died fairly suddenly Eustacia only had two people in her life, her Aunt Margery as her guardian and uncle Edmund as trustee, and it’s decided that she’ll go to boarding school – the Chalet School of course.

When Eustacia gets there she makes herself very unpopular from day one. She’s a prig and a sneak, two things that most schoolgirls detest, as do the teachers. The girls are intent on pulling her down several pegs. Eustacia can’t stand it and decides to run away, over the mountains!

Of course she has an accident which means a long recuperation. With visits from staff and girls Eustacia is a changed girl. When Eustacia is happy to call herself Stacie it’s seen as an improvement by the headmistress, they didn’t like her ‘sister’ Eustacia at all.

There are a lot of books in this Chalet School series, and they are still being written by different authors. I suspect that I will not be reading them all, but will probably just read up to just after the war years – I’ll see how it goes. They’re an enjoyable read, for me anyway.