Several things explain why I haven’t posted much lately–some extended Netflixing, rereading things that don’t fit here, like Mary Stewart and some early John Le Carre, and also rereading, yet again and very slowly, Mary Jane Holmes’ Tracy Park. This isn’t a review. I couldn’t write a review. I wrote a really long synopsis once, and that’s here. This is, I guess, an appreciation.

It’s ridiculous how much I love this book. Objectively it’s not very good, probably, but I’m not objective about it. And anyway, I think it’s Holmes’ best work, and that counts for something. It’s got things that others of her books have–insane people, and the name ‘Hastings,’ and a lot of low-key cruelty–but it’s also a lot kinder than her other books. No one is stripped entirely of their wealth, or left to die alone. No one goes  crazy to the point of raving and tearing their hair out. Frank never has to make a full confession to his brother. Everyone’s okay with each other in the end.

Frank is my favorite, probably, keeping on doing wrong and torturing himself over it for years and years. In a way he’s the villain of the story, but he might also be the most moral person in it–he never really convinces himself that what he’s done is okay. I tend to cry a lot reading the last few chapters of Tracy Park, and most of the bits I cry at involve Frank.

If he’s not my favorite, the Peterkin kids are. Ann Eliza gets my favorite happy ending, popular and wealthy and doted on by her husband and living in Paris–although Tom could be a little more doting. Tom’s happy ending is pretty good for me, too, and the faint praise with which Jerrie damns him is such a delight. “So much more of a man than she had ever supposed he could be.” And it’s better because this is Tom under the least trying circumstances possible: he’s rich, respected, has never had to work a day in his life. Things are pretty great for him, but I enjoy knowing that he’d still go to pieces if anything bad ever happened to him. I have a lot of affectionate hate for Tom Tracy.

And Billy Peterkin. Ann Eliza does pretty well for herself. All Billy gets is Jerrie’s friendship and the author’s promise that he’ll never marry. And I’m not sure how much I think of Jerrie’s friendship, considering that her first reaction to his proposal was to mock him. I reject Holmes’ vision of Billy’s future, and I’ve imagined, in rough outline, an alternate one, where he settles out west somewhere, and is properly appreciated by the people around him, and marries someone who both loves him and impresses everyone in Shannondale. If I could wish a single book into existence, it would be that story about Billy Peterkin.

Dolly Tracy deserves a mention, too. She’s so uncompromising as a character. She’s the one who, in another book by Mary Jane Holmes, would die bald and insane in a shack. And I don’t know how that doesn’t happen, or where Holmes’ change of heart came from, but she walks a very fine line with Dolly Tracy, making her equal parts awful and sympathetic. I wouldn’t want to hang out with Dolly Tracy, but I’m glad she travels to Florida every winter, and I’m sad that she’s lonely.

The main characters are less interesting. They have their moments, but their moments don’t always add up to anything. Harold’s the worst in that respect. Harold’s moments come early in the book, and there is nothing interesting about him at all once he grows up. Jerrie is better–I don’t think I would love this book as much as I do if I didn’t care about Jerrie–but Harold infects her with his blandness and also she made fun of Billy Peterkin for being short that one time. Arthur’s fun when he’s being super weird, but I don’t care about him the way I care about my favorites.

No one’s all bad or all good — except Harold, I guess, which may be why he doesn’t do anything for me — and that’s kind of special even in books where everyone is objectively good. Tracy Park is such a ridiculous melodrama, but it’s also pretty human, and…I don’t know. Mary Jane Holmes manipulates me very effectively, and I enjoy the experience.

When I was doing my annual selection of Christmas stories the other day, I couldn’t remember why I vaguely disliked Thomas Nelson Page, just that I did. And that’s how I ended up reading a Christmas story about a Confederate soldier and his family. And I guess I’m glad I did.

It’s called A Captured Santa Claus, and it takes place between a Christmas and a Christmas during the Civil War. Major Stafford’s children are disappointed with the homemade presents that are all their mother can afford, but their father, home on a flying visit, promises the younger children that they’ll get what they want next year. For five year old Charlie, that’s a uniform and a toy sword. For his younger sister, Evelyn, it’s a doll with eyes that open and close.

Will Major Stafford be able to buy the gifts? Will he get home to Holly Hill to deliver them? Well, of course he will. But there are complications. By Christmas, Holly Hill is behind the Union lines, and going home without his uniform on could get Major Stafford executed as a spy.

This is basically the story you expect, but there are just enough twists to stop it from being completely predictable. And while Christmas is front and center, the Christmas spirit that goes with it is allowed to function without fanfare.

I did spent most of the story resenting a bunch of children for being Confederates, but, you know, that happens.

I’ve been in a sort of Margaret Widdemer, sheltered girl finally getting the adventure she’s been wanting mood, so I keep picking up her books, but You’re Only Young Once isn’t in that mold. Instead of a lone, lonely heroine, you have a family of them, plus some brothers, with loving parents in the background. Angela Goldsborough is the eldest, a doll-like singing teacher, one of two daughters who are contributing to the family income. Then Janetta is tall, dark and business-minded, Deborah is dreamy and beautiful, Annice is quiet and quaint, and Isabella is lively and spoiled. All of them are pretty, and none of them lacks male attention — the older sisters draw lots for the parlor in the evening, because all of them are always expecting callers. Each of them gets a romance over the course of the book, and so do two of their three brothers — warm-hearted John and steady, bespectacled Worrel.

With so many young people to dispose of, none of them get very much time. Sometimes that’s fine — I was satisfied with how much I got of Deborah and Isabella, who each had a few extra chapters, post-engagement, and Angela’s story was almost too abrupt to engage me at all. But I would happily have read a whole book about Annice, who comes up with a ridiculous plan that turns out better than she has any right to expect. Or Janetta, who might be my favorite, and who doesn’t allow her marriage to end her career in real estate. And John really only gets half his story told.

All of my complaints boil down to wanting more, though, and that’s barely a criticism.

Dig Here! is a bunch of familiar elements — teenage girl best friends, missing treasure, a cranky aunt, and abandoned house, etc. — assembled in a way that didn’t feel familiar. I found myself wondering a lot whether this was the book Gladys Allen set out to write.

The main character, Sandy, is the daughter of missionaries. She’s sent to boarding school during the school year and to various relatives during the summers. When Dig Here! opens, she’s facing the prospect of spending the summer with Aunt Cal, who she’s never met, and who is related to her only by marriage. Aunt Cal says it’s okay for Sandy to bring a friend with her, so she invites her best friend, Eve, and it’s a good thing for her that she does. Eve is a much more forceful personality than Sandy is, and she’s also more adventurous, more sensible, and probably smarter. She’s even better at dealing with Aunt Cal, in part because she’s better at cooking and housework and, I don’t know, getting up on time than Sandy is.

This is one of the things that makes me unsure Allen knows what book she’s writing. Someone — maybe one of Sandy’s parents, in a letter? — talks about how sunny and sweet Sandy is, but all we actually see evidence of is Eve being better at everything. Towards the end you get a little more of a sense of Sandy as a person in her own right, but not much.

It’s an Augusta Huiell Seaman kind of setup. On their arrival at Aunt Cal’s the girls find that Sandy accidentally exchanged suitcases with a fellow bus passenger — a hair tonic salesman, judging by his luggage. A trip to exchange the suitcase for Sandy’s leads them to an old house, and hair tonic guy behaving suspiciously. Then the house turns out to be the one that Aunt Cal should have inherited from her uncle — and would have, if her shiftless cousin hadn’t hidden his will. There also may or may not be an emerald buried somewhere around the property. I’m not sure Eve and Sandy know which of these mysteries they’re investigating, but they investigate with a will, and with the help of cute farmboy Michael, and, eventually, the various hindrances provided by their school friend Hattie May and her brother Hamish. Hamish fancies himself as a detective.

I think what makes Dig Here! feel unusual is that books like these tend to have a very narrow focus. The kids solving the mystery are usually a small, tight-knit group. The crotchety relative exists to have their heart melted by the main character. You get your protagonist, his or her friends, whatever adults they live with, and maybe a villain. But in Dig Here!, everything’s part of a larger picture you don’t see. There are characters you never meet, like Sandy’s parents and Aunt Cal’s cousin. And the characters you do meet have stuff going on that the kids don’t know about. There are subplots that Sandy and Eve don’t find out about until the end, and then only as an afterthought. Aunt Cal is investigating on her own account, and doesn’t tell Sandy anything about it. And she doesn’t need to confide in Sandy — she’s not socially isolated, she’s got friends, and they probably know more about the mystery than Sandy does, too. It gives the book a different feel than you’d get from Seaman, or from any mystery where the kids hide what’s happening from the clueless grownups. And I enjoyed that.

The downside of the kids not having most of the story is that their side of the mystery isn’t that interesting, and the characters I enjoyed most were the ones Allen spent the least time on, but it was fun.I don’t think I need to seek out more books by Gladys Allen, but if I ended up reading another one, I wouldn’t be upset.

I really enjoy terrible mysteries, but only a certain kind of terrible mystery. The episodic, gimmicky, pulpy kind that always feel like they were written between 1896 and 1906, whether or not they actually were.

This is my third attempt at writing a review of Aprilly, by Jane Abbott. I’m not sure why writing about it is so daunting. It’s never going to be my favorite Jane Abbott book — there are structural issues, and a lot of what happens feels unearned. Also I found it hard to sympathize with the protagonist, and wished some of the other characters got more page time. But all of these things are things I’ve had time to think out. When I finished the book, I mostly just thought, “that was nice, but the romance was kind of creepy and unnecessary and Laughing Last was better.”

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but I doubt I’ll want to read it again. And if you want more information than that (you should) here’s a bit of a synopsis:

April Dangerfield is left penniless and homeless (I mean, approximately) after the death of her circus performer mother, and somehow ends up in a small town in Maine, where she finds a number of friends, including the usual crotchety spinster, and eventually acquires a family. And also a horse.

Jane Abbott falls flat for me sometimes, usually in the books everyone else seems to like best. I guess this is just one of those times.

Patty’s Fortune is divided pretty clearly into two sections. In the first Bill Farnsworth hosts a house party in an empty hotel, and in the second Philip Van Reypen’s aunt attempts to coerce Patty into marrying Phil. Hopefully that will make it easier to talk about. I’ve been struggling with these last few books, mostly because I have a hard time telling them apart.

The house party thing is, I guess, Wells’ chance to revisit the premise of The Dorrance Domain, except with wealthy young people being waited on by shoals of servants instead of children in straitened circumstances mostly waiting on themselves. The party consists of twelve people, including the Kenerleys as chaperones, a new man called Chick Channing, and no Philip. Yay!

The party would be a complete success (Kit Cameron channels Mr. Rochester! Mona and Roger finally get engaged!) except that it’s indirectly the means of Patty’s introduction to Maudie Adams, a theatrical promoter who tries to convince her to go on the stage. Patty is maybe at her least appealing in this book — more human, but not in a likable way. It’s always been a mystery how Patty stays unspoiled in the midst of so much wealth and attention, but sometimes it seems like the answer to that question is, “Well, maybe she doesn’t.”

Without really seeming to have changed, Patty looks as vain and as spoiled as we’ve ever seen her. I guess that’s mostly when she wants to go on the stage, though. Once we get to the second half of the book, all of my sympathies are with her again. Otherwise some of them would have to be with Lady Van, Phil’s aunt, who tries to subtly and then less subtly coerce Patty into an engagement with Phil. Or with Patty’s parents, who willingly go along with the more subtle coercion. Or with Phil, which, no.

When trying to groom Patty for Phil doesn’t do the trick, Lady Van, in her final illness, tries to get Patty to promise to marry him, telling her that she (Lady Van) will die right then and there if she (Patty) doesn’t. It’s underhanded and gross, and thankfully Fred and Nan Fairfield agree with me, because I was starting to distrust them.

Then…well, as if the emotional blackmail wasn’t enough, Lady Van passes her illness on to Patty (I know, I’m being unfair, she didn’t do it on purpose) and between that and her stress over the promise Lady Van forced out of her, Patty ends up in pretty bad shape.

It’s cool, though. She’s saved through vaguely supernatural means and also Bill Farnsworth.

Next up is Patty Blossom. We’re on the home stretch, guys.

Jenn recommended Chip of the Flying U, by B.M. Bower, about a year ago, and that’s probably how long it’s been sitting on my Kindle. I don’t know why I picked it up this weekend, except that the internet in my apartment wasn’t working and I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about anything I was more familiar with, but I’m glad I did. It’s almost entirely delightful, one of those books that does enough right that you don’t care that much about the stuff it doesn’t. And if you have to be content with a kind of ham-fisted ending, well, everything before that is so much fun that the book has kind of earned the right to fall apart in the last chapter.

The Flying U is a Montana ranch owned by James G. Whitmore, and Chip is a sensitive, artistic cow-puncher. Don’t laugh; it’s awesome. He’s got a square chin and long eyelashes and a horse he loves a lot, and it’s kind of over the top, but in a cute way. Della Whitmore is cute, too. She’s the younger sister of James G., paying an extended visit after graduation from medical school, and she’s got grey eyes and dimples to go with Chip’s chin and eyelashes.

She makes a positive first impression when she shoots a coyote with Chip’s rifle on the way back from the train station, the day of her arrival. The rest of the book is about him being in denial about being in love with her, basically. There’s no reason he should deny it, except that Della writes frequently to a Dr. Cecil Granthum. So Chip mopes, and “the Little Doctor” flirts with him and displays a fair amount of unreasonable behavior. I worry this is meant to make her seem more feminine. But more importantly, she’s good at her job, and he’s good at his, and there’s humor and artistic triumphs and a tiny bit of adventure besides. It’s a funny book and a sweet one, and while I found Della inconsistent, and Chip almost unrecognizable in the final scene, it his enough of the right buttons at the right times that I smiled my way through the entire book.

This is a formal apology for not having anything special to post.

But here, check out some of Sabatini’s early short stories. It’s fun to guess beforehand a) whether or not it will be terrible, b) whether or not he recycled the story into a novel later, and c) whether the hero will have a lean sardonic countenance.

The books in the series are very much running together for me by the time I get to Patty’s Romance, and this one is no exception. Although I guess that’s a funny thing to day about a book that has, as its central incident, Patty’s kidnapping.

I mean, it’s not the most dramatic kidnapping. There’s kind of a cool bit where the various members of the Kenerley household, where Patty’s staying, slowly come to the realization that she must have been taken. But after that, there’s not much suspense, just a lot of men talking about how they don’t believe in paying ransom normally, but it’s different when it’s Patty. She never seems to be in much danger, unless it’s of dying of boredom, and we see very little of the kidnappers.

Patty cleverly brings about her own rescue, but it’s then carried out by Phil Van Reypen, which, as you can imagine, doesn’t make me very happy. It’s the high point of Phil behavior in this book, the low point coming when he tells her she’s not smart enough to play golf. That happens post-rescue, when Phil and his aunt take Patty on a trip to…oh, I don’t know, every mountain resort in the northeast. That’s what it feels like, anyway.

Phil gets another shot at rescuing Patty at one of these, thanks to a character who seems to exist solely for the purpose of stealing their boat and leaving them stranded on a small island. But Bill Farnsworth shows up and saves his life/steals his thunder. Which I guess is representative of his now obvious status as Wells’ favorite. Especially if you think about Mr. Hepworth rescuing Patty when her boat comes unmoored in Patty’s Summer Days.

Anyway, at this point if you’re paying attention you know that Patty’s going to fall in love with Bill eventually, and maybe that’s why Wells keeps heaping praise on Phil — because she feels sorry for him, or because she’s trying to cover her tracks. Or because it seems too much like Patty’s in love with  Bill already. There’s a fine line between “Bill’s always been kind of special to her” and “why does Patty keep saying she’s not in love with anyone?”

So, this book isn’t one of my favorites, but it’ll do, mostly thanks to Bill. And I’m enjoying him as much as I can, because, if I recall correctly, I’m going to like him a lot less two or three books from now.

Patty’s Suitors is pretty much Kit Cameron’s book, if you’re looking for an easy way to remember it (and I am). It also gives us proposals from Ken and Phil (yes, again) as well as another flying visit from Big Bill Farnsworth, but Kit is new and Kit is involved throughout. And Kit is funny, and Phil Van Reypen hates him, so I’m pretty cool with that.

Kit is the cousin of Patty’s new friend Marie Homer (who exists to provide an alternate love interest for Ken as well as to introduce Kit, but who seems nice). Patty ends up accidentally talking to him on the phone one night when she’s trying to get hold of Marie, and, being Patty, conceals her identity and flirts with him instead of apologizing for the wrong number.

This clearly appeals to Kit’s sense of humor, and, once the issue of Patty’s identity is cleared up, they spend most of the rest of the book playing pranks on each other. He proposes to her, too, but she mostly talks him out of being serious about it.

Anyway, it doesn’t mean much. Once she’s out in society, people are always proposing to Patty. And then she steers them towards her friends. Kit gets pointed in the direction of Daisy Dow, who used to be awful to Patty but I guess isn’t in love with Bill Farnsworth anymore. Ken is paired off with Marie Homer by the narrative even before he’s proposed to Patty. I wish Ken didn’t have to propose to Patty, though. It reduces him, somehow. He’s been a part of Patty’s life since Patty at Home, and everyone thinks he’s great. I understand that everyone has to fall in love with her, but when it comes time to refuse him, Patty has to give him reasons she’s not in love with him and reasons he shouldn’t be in love with her, which is a) super condescending, and b) not her decision to make.

She doesn’t give Phil reasons. I’m very resentful of Phil Van Reypen being treated better than Kenneth Harper. And Patty apparently likes Phil best right now, which makes me like Patty less than I’ve ever liked her before.

Bill shows up toward the end, in an episode that should definitely tell you, if you didn’t already know, that he’s endgame. There have been plenty of men and boys who have been jealous of Patty’s other suitors, but none of them have made Patty jealous, and that seems to be the point of this bit — to show us that even if Patty doesn’t know it yet, this one is different for her.

The stretch of the series between Patty’s Social Season and, I guess, Patty-Blossom, tends to run together. Lunches and evening parties alternate with house parties and Phil Van Reypen getting Patty into scrapes and flying visits from Bill Farnsworth. This one starts with Patty’s official debut — she’s an adult now, not that you would know the difference — encompasses Mr. Hepworth’s engagement to Christine Farley and a Christmas house party with the Kenerleys, and winds up with Christine and Mr. Hepworth’s wedding. I think Wells felt she had to dispose of Mr. Hepworth quickly.

When I first read the books in which Mr. Hepworth was paired off with someone who wasn’t, you know, Patty, I was pretty upset. But that was when I was in college, and since then I’ve grown to appreciate the fact that the adult who falls in love with a child doesn’t end up with her, as he would in kind of an upsettingly large number of other books. That said, I still have issues with how Wells gets rid of Gilbert Hepworth. Because it’s like she also came around to the idea that they shouldn’t get married late in the game, only now she wants to pretend that she never meant Patty and Mr. Hepworth to be a thing, and I don’t think that’s true.

I’m not saying Patty’s in love with him, ever, just that we’re coming off a string of books in which he understands her better than anyone else, in which she trusts him more than anyone else, and in which it’s pretty clearly demonstrated that the only reason she doesn’t know he’s in love with her is that she’s chosen not to know. And those things are all fine, and possible to move on from, but it feels a little bit weird when you don’t even acknowledge them. It’s like Wells doesn’t want to admit there was ever a possibility of Patty falling in love with him, and…I don’t know, I just really think she must have.  Anyway, Wells tries to get through this somewhat awkward situation by not having Patty and Mr. Hepworth exchange more than a few words once he’s engaged, and it’s not convincing. Or it’s afraid to try to be convincing, maybe.

The Mr. Hepworth parts of the book are pretty minor, but, well. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

The other thread that runs through the book is Mona Galbraith’s involvement with an adventurer she doesn’t particularly want to be rescued from. Also Phil proposes for the first time–for the first dozen times, probably, very few of them in situations where Patty is able to walk away from the conversation if she wants to. (He is, as ever, the worst.) Also, Patty, Elise, Mona and Clementine Morse (Clementine Morse!) start a club to entertain working people on Saturday afternoons, and it’s pretty cute.

The entire book is cute, really, aside from Philip. And it’s pretty routine, but that’s a nice thing. Nothing ever really happens in Patty Fairfield books, and I’ve never been sure whether my love of them is because or in spite of that. But I’m very sure that I love them.

There’s a reason I got stuck on Patty’s Motor Car when I was reviewing the Patty Fairfield books. A couple of reasons, I guess. And if you want to look at it that way, the reasons’ names are Philip Van Reypen and Christine Farley.

I’m a weirdo who spends a lot of time thinking about things like how Patty Fairfield’s suitors fit into the structure of the series, and I think there’s a turning point here, a two-book transition between between the first seven books of the series and the last eight. Everything through Patty’s Pleasure Trip is about Patty the kid. Then, in Patty’s Success, Wells pushes Patty into the real world by making her deal with the job market. Then she introduces Christine and Phil, apparently for the purpose of splitting up Patty and Mr. Hepworth. This book brings Christine and Phil closer–and for the record, I don’t actually dislike Christine, just what she represents–and moves Patty further into the world by giving her mobility, in the form of an electric car.

I wonder a lot whether Wells seriously considered Phil as a possible endgame suitor for Patty. I find him so consistently awful, but I can’t find any sign that Wells agrees, unless writing him as a reckless, selfish manipulator who thinks he can get away with anything because he always has before counts.

Um, so, yeah. I hate Phil Van Reypen so much. You can take that as a given, although I have no doubt I’ll manage to remind you. Anyway, the next book changes the trajectory of the series a little, but I find it difficult to read these two books that push Patty towards Phil, because he is the worst. I started keeping a journal again shortly before I started rereading this book and now it’s full of “WORST”s in relation to Phil. In fact, if you looked at my journal, you’d think the whole book was instances of Phil being awful alternating with wordless conversations between Patty and Mr. Hepworth. And it is, kind of, but some other stuff happens, too.

So, this car company holds a contest: they put out a book of puzzles and riddles and things, and the person who sends in the most complete and correct set of answers by the deadline wins an electric car. Patty, with a bit of help from Kenneth Harper, a lot of help from Phil, and a bit of important last minute help from Mr. Hepworth, submits a set of answers and–you noticed the title, right?–wins the car.

The Fairfields move to the Jersey shore for the summer, and Patty gets to drive her car around a bunch, and we’re introduced to Mona Galbraith, who Wells never actually describes as nouveau riche. Instead Wells calls her “pushing,” and says her house and her clothes are unnecessarily fancy, but it’s cool, we all know what she means.

But yeah, other than that it’s all Phil getting Patty into scrapes, which he sometimes also gets hor out of, and also there’s a delightfully uncomfortable conversation between Patty and Christine where Christine tries to get Patty to acknowledge that Mr. Hepworth is in love with her and Patty says some stuff that’s one step removed from repeating “I’m not having this conversation,” over and over again. It’s pretty great.

Anyway, I hate Phil Van Reypen, but the rest of this book is pretty fun.

I’ve been feeling lately like I’m having a hard time being enthusiastic about the books I’m reading. That happens every once in a while, and it’s always hard to tell whether it’s the books, or me suffering from a general deficiency of enthusiasm, or just my poor memory of how much I enjoyed things.

Looking back at recent posts, I don’t think it’s that third thing. I ended up mostly liking Dwell Deep, and Up the Hill and Over was fascinating, but neither of them comes anywhere near being my new favorite book. Although actually, The Turned-About Girls was great. And I guess Laughing Last, by Jane Abbott, isn’t my new favorite book either, but I love it enough to that I feel like I can safely blame any lack of enthusiasm on my recent reading material. I mean, I don’t feel like gushing about it or anything, but basically it was delightful and I have no complaints.

Jane Abbott is just so good, you know? Very few authors are as good at writing girls of a pre-romance age. And Laughing Last is very Jane Abbott-y, but it’s also got elements of L.T. Meade and Augusta Huiell Seaman and most of it is set in a kind of Joseph Crosby Lincoln milieu, and it’s just delightful in all sorts of ways. I might have to take back what I said about gushing.

The beginning of the book is perhaps the Meade-iest part. It introduces us to the four Romley girls, who range in age from 26 to 15. They’re the daughters of famous poet Joseph Romley, and while they do technically have a pair of guardians or trustees, in effect they’re under the thumb of the local chapter of the League of American Poets, which paid off the mortgage on their house, and consequently feels that it’s okay to bring tours through on Saturdays and keep the girls at their beck and call.

Isolde, the eldest, usually handles the tours, mostly because she’s the one who best fits everyone’s notions of how a poet’s daughter ought to look and act. Then there’s Trude, the practical, motherly one; Victoria, the prettiest and least responsible; and Sidney, the dreamy, stifled fifteen year old.

In search of adventure, Sidney invites herself to spend the summer with a totally unknown relative on Cape Cod. Elderly Achsa Green and her “different” nephew, Lavender, aren’t what Sidney expects, and nor is their home. Sidney’s kind of appalled at first, but with the help of the Green’s summer boarder, she learns to appreciate them. Then she meets Martie Calkins, a girl about her age, and learns a bunch of practical skills, like digging clams. And then, finally, she has a pretty exciting adventure. Jane Abbott’s good at adventures, too–this is, in a way, the most over the top adventure I’ve read in one of her books, but she keeps it grounded.

But mostly you just get to watch Sidney grow up a little, and see things turn out well for her, and it’s great. Sidney’s a little ridiculous sometimes, because she’s a fifteen year old girl with an imagination, but that’s actually an awesome thing to be, and Abbott doesn’t suggest otherwise or condescend.

Again: Jane Abbott is so good. I don’t know why I don’t read her more often.

I’m sorry to report that I didn’t love Cloudy Jewel. A bunch of people recommended it, and it definitely sounds as if it should be right up my alley, but I’ve never met a Grace Livingston Hill character I liked more than a little, and if I had, Julia Cloud wouldn’t be it.

She should be. She’s a capable, unselfish spinster left at loose ends after her mother dies. She doesn’t want to go live with her genuinely awful sister and brother-in-law, and fair enough, but she hasn’t got enough money to do anything else. Enter her orphaned, almost grown-up niece and nephew, Leslie and Allison. They’re bound for college, and they want her to live with them and keep house and be a substitute parent with a salary. They find a house and furnish it at length, with nice rugs and modern appliances and kind of a lot of homemade curtains. And I don’t know what French gray enamel furniture looks like, but somehow it sounds really appealing.

So there’s home-making (always fun!) and winding the population of the town around the Clouds’ collective finger (usually fun) and also there’s kind of a lot of religion. Which isn’t actually a problem for me in itself, but it might be becoming a problem for me with Grace Livingston Hill. I might not have realized this if I hadn’t stopped in the middle of Cloudy Jewel to read something by Amy Le Feuvre, but I did, and when I came back to Hill afterwards she started to look like a hypocrite.

I mean, there’s a fine line. You want characters to be human beings, not saints, right? But Julia Cloud seems meant to be saintly, only Grace Livingston Hill doesn’t know how to show that. Julia’s clearly not meant to be too saintly — Hill knows not to do that. But she doesn’t know how to temper Julia’s saintliness. Like, laughing at Leslie and Allison’s mean-spirited jokes. Not cool. These aren’t, like, sociopathic, Tom Rover mean jokes, but they do betray a fundamental lack of sympathy for people in general.

Okay, so, eight or ten years ago I was at a bar or bat mitzvah for one of my cousins, and the rabbi talked about the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. My family hated this rabbi so much. We still talk about him once in a while. And here’s why: mostly he wanted to narrow the definition of “neighbor.” Your neighbors, he said, weren’t the people who happened to be around you. They were the people you’d chosen to go through life with.

Take a minute to think that through. Going by that definition, the commandment becomes meaningless. Because this is the golden rule: treat people as you want to be treated. You don’t get to choose who to be nice to and who not to be nice to. But what this rabbi was saying kind of boils down to this: be nice  to the people you want to be nice to. You only have to be nice to the people who are like you. In fact, you get to decide who is and isn’t worth treating well. And I’m not religious, but doesn’t that completely miss the point? I mean, you’re only really as nice as you are to the person you’re least nice to.

Hill reminds me of that rabbi. Not in an overt way, but…I don’t know. If I’m reading a book about people who are “real Christians,” I don’t want to see them delighting in uncharitableness towards people who haven’t done anything especially awful. And I say that as someone who’s pretty uncharitable, as a rule. If Julia Cloud is supposed to be better than me, I want her to actually be better.

I guess the bottom line is that all I want from religious fiction is a sense of everyone being essentially human, and worth being nice to. And it’s less important that I get that from the character then that I get it from the author. I get that from Le Feuvre. I get it from Susan Warner. I even get it from Mary Jane Holmes, who is super vindictive all the time and not necessarily very religious. But I don’t get it from Hill, who doesn’t seem to think anyone other than the three Clouds and their two best friends is terribly important. And sure, that’s not the end of the world. But it does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway.

I thought Cloudy Jewel was fun. I didn’t care about or respect any of the characters enough for more than that, and I haven’t figured out why the interior decoration and club organizing bits weren’t more satisfying for me, but I was, at least, really into Leslie’s motoring adventure. I mean, I was into any bit where Leslie shot at people. Also I’ve spent entirely too much time wondering why they couldn’t have carried a thermos or two on their cold-weather hikes and canoe trips instead of an actual pot of soup.

So, apparently Grace Livingston Hill’s brand of religion makes me want to go read about Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religion. And I suppose it serves me right that Dwell Deep is more Hill-like that any Le Feuvre book I’ve read to date. It’s the story of Hilda Thorn, a young woman who moves in with her guardian’s family, who have little tolerance for her religious scruples.

I think the fact that she was converted before the story begins was part of what bugged me, although I guess it saved me one of Le Feuvre’s weirdly unsatisfactory conversion scenes. I also wasn’t wild about the first person narration, although I eventually got used to it.

The setup reminds me a little bit of Elsie Dinsmore, with a religious main character surrounded by people who not only don’t share her views, but can’t seem to live and let live. But it seems more pointless here. There’s no real reason for them to get angry with her for choosing not to go to parties, as her guardian does, or to tease her mercilessly about her religion, as her guardian’s son Kenneth does. She even points out to Kenneth how unfair he is to her: if she doesn’t react to his teasing, it’s because she considers herself above the rest of them, and if she does, she’s not as good as she pretends to be. She can’t win. And then he’s like, yeah, I guess that’s true, and continues to be an asshole.

That said, it’s hard to see the Forsyths’ lack of sympathy and occasional hostility towards Hilda as anything resembling persecution. A sickly poor child dies, but that’s the function of sickly poor children in books like this. One of the Forsyths’ guests is more of an asshole to Hilda than Kenneth, even, but that never seems terribly important, either. Even when a major character gets sick and nearly dies, we only find out about it once she’s on the road to recovery. The stakes are never very high, is what I’m saying.

I did get into Dwell Deep, eventually. I stopped being disconcerted by the first person narration, and got comfortable with Hilda as a character. And I like Hilda’s hands-off attitude to converting people, and that the most important piece of advice she gets is basically to trust her own judgement, because otherwise someone else’s opinion could become more important to her than God. It’s not exactly the thing I’m used to seeing from Le Feuvre, but it’s in harmony with the way she always treats religion–as a framework, a system of belief rather than just a belief. I don’t think I’m going to itch to reread Dwell Deep the way I itch to reread Her Kingdom and Olive Tracy, but I still like Amy Le Feuvre a lot.

First of all, I had a “wow, the banner i created in 2007 using my minimal Photoshop skills is kind of terrible-looking” moment this morning. Is that just me, or…?

The other thing is that I’ve been looking through one of my many lists of books to read, and it’s kind of overwhelming. So, regular readers of this blog, what’s the one book you feel like I should have reviewed, but haven’t?

Cathlin recently recommended The Turned-About Girls, by Beulah Marie Dix, and it was already sort of in the back of my head, because someone else — Mel? — was reading it recently. And I’ve been reading a whole string of things trying to avoid reading any more of Bulldog Drummond, so I started it almost immediately. And it’s really, really good.

The girls in question are Jacqueline Gildersleeve, a wealthy orphan on her way to spend the summer with her father’s aunt and cousin, and Caroline Tait, a poor orphan being send to live on her aunt’s farm. Neither of them has ever met the relatives in question, and neither of them is eager to. So when they meet on the train and discover they’re headed for the same town,  Jacqueline, who’s just read The Prince and the Pauper, hatches a plan for them to switch places.

Both of them are clearly happier with each other’s relatives than they would be with their own. Caroline, who is quiet and dreamy and musical, gets pretty things and piano lessons and two women who come to dote on her. Jackie, who is active and fearless and headstrong, gets kids to play with, new skills to learn as she helps out around the house, and an aunt and grandmother who come to love and depend on her, which is more satisfying than the sheltering kind of love that Caroline gets from Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope.

If there’s a major flaw in The Turned-About Girls, that’s it. Dix alternates between Jackie and Caroline’s points of view, and succeeds in making both of them sympathetic, but as the book progresses, it’s hard to avoid noticing that Jackie is growing as a person and Caroline is not. Jackie is the one who does things. It’s not just that she’s working hard on Aunt Martha’s farm while Caroline is being pampered in town — Jackie is actively learning new things. Her new skills go with lessons learned. When she learns to cook, it’s not just a new skill; it goes and in hand with her growing desire to be helpful to Aunt Martha and Grandma. When she gets into scrapes, it’s because she’s learning to have consideration for other people’s belongings. Caroline makes use of and improves upon skills she’s already got – sewing, playing the piano — but there’s no corresponding character growth. The closest she comes to growing is prompting growth in Cousin Penelope. And she spends most of the book scared or hiding or on the verge of tears. Jackie acts. Caroline is acted upon.

I actually started out wanting to focus on Caroline, and getting impatient with Jackie’s sections. Caroline, I think, is meant to be the real protagonist of the book. But Jackie is the one that makes the book compelling.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, because the key thing is that the book is compelling. It just makes the ending a little less satisfying, because Caroline is the one  who gets to stay with her family of choice. Jackie will help out the Conways financially, but I can’t be the only one who finished the book worried about how Aunt Martha was going to cope without Jackie or Caroline to help her out around the house. Right?

When I start reading a book and the protagonist is a doctor recovering from a nervous breakdown, and he comes to a small town and settles down to practice small town medicine incognito and becomes interested in the daughter of the previous town doctor, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what I’m getting. In the case of Up the Hill and Over, by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, I was very wrong.

It’s hart to talk about how I was wrong without giving away a couple of twists–twists that I did see coming, but not far enough ahead that I didn’t have to change my mind about what kind of book I though I was reading a couple of times. There are three specific things that complicate the narrative I expected. One of them was insanity, and I want to talk about that. The other two are a little spoilery, and I’ll mention them without giving details.

So, one of the characters, Aunt Amy, is introduced as being a little odd, and having strange fancies about things. You learn about her mental issues slowly, so at first it just seems like she’s perfectly sensible, if a little eccentric. Then you get more specific information: she believes that the sprigged tea set doesn’t like being touched by anyone but her, and that someone she refers to as “Them” is out to get her. The cause of her problems–her fiancé dying on the eve of their wedding–is typical of insane women in novels, but the details of her beliefs and their effects are so much more specific. I mean, when you’ve got a secret insane wife or something in, say, a Mary Jane Holmes novel, madness is a permanent change in state, a fundamental attribute of the character. There was a time when the woman was not mad, but now she is, and the only change possible going forward is her death.

It’s not like that with Aunt Amy. Actually, another character ends up fitting into that trope much more closely. Amy’s madness is a permanent state, but not…I guess the word I want here is homogeneous. I mean, it’s not just that she’s better at some times and worse at others. Her madness is multifaceted, and doesn’t make her any less of an agent. The development of Amy’s illness, or the depiction of it, is such that you move through being sorry for her to being scared for her to being scared for the people around her, and it’s just…really interesting. For early 20th century popular fiction, it’s very psychologically complex. There’s a fairly modern depiction of drug addiction, too, and while the, uh, legal complication that you’re probably going to suspect pretty early on is exactly what it looks like, there’s surprisingly little moralizing wrapped up in it.

I was never, at any moment, in love with this book or with any of the characters, so there were a few places where I didn’t get the emotional punch I needed to make certain plot developments work for me. At least, that’s how I’m explaining to myself the fact that bits that I didn’t think should have felt melodramatic did. I kept a little bit of an emotional distance from the book throughout, and not by choice. But I also stayed absorbed in it the entire time, and could barely put it down, and while there were bits that felt like too much, for the most part it just kept getting more and more interesting until the end. I expected a much more cheerful book when I started, but I wasn’t disappointed by any means.

I never wrote anything about Hilda Wade, did I?

So, obviously I’m pretty into Miss Cayley’s Adventures. So into it that I was kind of terrified of reading anything else by Grant Allen, which is why Hilda Wade has been languishing on my Kindle (and then my other Kindle) for several years. I shouldn’t have worried, though. Hilda Wade is good and bad in almost exactly the same ways as Miss Cayley’s Adventures is good and bad.

It’s narrated by Dr. Hubert Cumberledge, who is to doctor-narrators what many of Carolyn Wells’ protagonists are to lawyer-narrators, except that unlike most Carolyn Wells protagonists, he is capable of seeing women as people. Most of Grant Allen’s characters are capable of seeing women as people. Grant Allen’s female characters command respect.

Anyway, Hilda Wade is a nurse, and she and Dr. Cumberledge work at a hospital with Professor Sebastian, who is a Great Man. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a good man, though, and Hilda Wade knows he’s not. It’s pretty clear to the reader early on that Hilda a) does not like Sebastian, b) had some special purpose in coming to work for him, and c) probably wants revenge for something he did to her father. Eventually these things also become clear to Sebastian, and even, eventually, to Dr. Cumberledge.

Dr. Cumberledge is only moderately bright, compared to Professor Sebastian’s genius and Hilda’s superhuman intuition, but he’s pretty likable, mostly because his awe of Hilda turns out to be greater than his awe of Professor Sebastian. Early on, he’s skeptical of her concerns about Sebastian, but she slowly convinces him, and it works because he respects her and listens to her and is willing to see her point of view. And for all that the novel goes way downhill once he is convinced, that’s a really nice thing.

After that, the book gets adventurous and racist and sentimental, but wound to a close entertainingly enough that I never wanted to put it down. Apparently the last chapter was written by Arthur Conan Doyle from Grant Allen’s notes after his death or during his final illness. I have to say, I wasn’t a huge fan of the last chapter, but I don’t know that him not dying would have helped–he has a tendency to fall apart toward the end of a book. That’s the thing about Grant Allen, though: he starts off so strong, and builds up enough good will, that he’s free to make a mess of things later on–it doesn’t really matter that much. I guess Grant Allen’s heroines are better than his books, which doesn’t bother me at all, because the opposite is so much more common.

Lois Cayley is still better than Hilda Wade, though. She’s funnier.

I tried to read the first Game of Thrones book last month (maybe last month? it seems like longer ago) and failed out of it 80% of the way through. I’ve been recovering by reading Georgette Heyer, and I’m not done yet.

I mostly avoid reading Marie Conway Oemler books I haven’t read before — I dread the point at which there won’t be any left I haven’t read. So I’ve been putting off reading Two Shall Be Born for, like, five years at least.

I don’t know if it was worth waiting for. I don’t, at this point, expect any book of hers to live up to Slippy McGee or A Woman Named Smith, and this one certainly doesn’t. But that’s not to say it isn’t pretty interesting and weird, and that’s all I really want, I guess.

I don’t want to say that this is Marie Conway Oemler’s Ruritanian romance, although it has a bit of a flavor of that. And I’m not sure if I want to say that this book is Mary Roberts Rinehart-ish in the same way that Slippy McGee is Gene Stratton Porter-ish, but there were moments when it seemed to have more in common with Rinehart than with Oemler’s other work. I only recognized Oemler in flashes — the disheveled single-mindedness of an artistic genius, the hero who looks like “a young god with good morals,” anything relating to what Irish people are like.

The premise of the book is, I suppose, about people falling in love at first sight. Fortunately, that’s not actually what the book is about. Countess Marya Jadwiga Zuleska’s love interest doesn’t even appear until what feels like more than halfway through the book, but apparently isn’t quite. Really it’s Marya Jadwiga’s book, but I didn’t feel like I got to know her as well as I got to know anyone in A Woman Named Smith or Slippy McGee or evenThe Purple Heights.

Marya Jadwiga is the daughter of a famous scholar and Polish patriot who apparently functions as some kind of spymaster for a Polish independence movement. Everything he has, he contributes to this movement — including his daughter, who he educates so as to make her as useful as possible to him. It’s not really clear exactly what that education consists of, or how he intends to use her, but I think the book would have been so much better if it had been. Anyway, we never really find out what he meant to do, because his impending death and the pressure exerted on him by Russian and German agents force him to change his plans and send Marya Jadwiga to America.

I mean, other stuff happens first. But I don’t really know how to get into it without spoiling the grisliest axe murder I’ve read since The After House, so.

Once she gets there, there’s a little bit of a Samuel Hopkins Adams in The Flagrant Years vibe, and once we’re introduced to Brian Kelly there’s a bit of a Samuel Hopkins Adams in general vibe, neither of which upset me. Brian’s story gives us a little of the character makeover thing — he’s had a fight with his rich dad and run off to become a policeman, and of course he learns to be a very good one. But, as with Marya Jadwiga, I wished more time had been spent on the learning part. If not the traffic policeman stuff, more than a few vague hints about other, more exciting police work would have been appreciated.

Brian and Marya Jadwiga meet one evening after Marya Jadwiga stabs someone (yeah, it’s pretty cool) although they’ve already seen each other and fallen in love at first sight at that point. Brian brings Marya Jadwiga to his boarding house, and the final turns of the plot take place there, among the friends he’s made. But the two of them, having gotten the falling in love part out of the way at the beginning, don’t seem to have much to say to each other.

It’s as if, having already fallen in love, they don’t need to get to know each other. And that’s what I hate about stories where people fall in love at first sight, because the getting to know each other part is the best part, and I don’t understand why anyone would want to skip past it. Especially Marie Conway Oemler, who’s so, so good at having her characters enjoy each others’ company. I mean, Sophy and Alicia. The Author and anyone he appreciates properly. Armand de Rancé and Slippy McGee. There’s no pair of characters in Two Shall be Born that made me feel like just seeing them interact was enough, except maybe the Kelly siblings. Some of that might be because it’s meant to be a very serious book, with attempted rape and beheadings and people watching each other die, but Oemler wasn’t really a serious story kind of author.

I did enjoy Two Shall be Born. I just think Oemler could have done something batter. I mean, that, and I wish I could read A Woman Named Smith or Slippy McGee for the first time again.

Mel was reading this one, and it sounded interesting, but I don’t think it’s for me.

The Annals of Ann is by Kate Trimble Sharber, who a quick google search told me nothing about. But the book itself is pretty straightforward: Ann is a teenager who lives somewhere in the South with her parents and her mammy, and she uses her diary mostly to talk about her various acquaintances pairing off.

The book is one of those teenage girl diary ones where the author is relying heavily on the reader getting jokes that the narrator doesn’t. And that’s worked for me approximately once, in The Visits of Elizabeth. The rest of the time I find it a little irritating and uncomfortable. If you like that kind of thing, I think this is probably a pretty good version of it. I wasn’t tempted to put it down or anything. I just kind of resent it when authors are like, “hey let’s have a joke on the protagonist of my novel together.”

I’ve created a Google Group because a) it seemed like the best compromise between a forum and a mailing list and b) I’m pretty familiar with the back end.

So, don’t feel obligated to participate, but if you want, head over and introduce yourself.

Nell S. and I have been talking about the possibility of a place to discuss…whatever it is I  write about and we talk about here. I usually refer to it as “outdated popular fiction.” We were initially talking about a message board, but message boards intimidate me, so now we’re also talking about a Google/Yahoo group-style mailing list.

My thoughts are basically as follows: I’ve moderated Google Groups, and they’re super easy to use and allow you to participate in discussions via email but don’t really let you organize or preserve information in any useful way (although GG does have tagging and categories). And if you do participate via email, it’s hard to avoid spoilers.

Message boards let you organize things via category, which is nice, but I find them inherently kind of clunky. And it’s hard to read everything on a message board the way you can when you’ve got everything on a mailing list coming to your inbox.

It seems like there’s a lot more discussion going on here lately, and that’s awesome, but blog comments aren’t the best place to talk. So: are you guys interested in some kind of discussion space? Any preferences on type?