Life must be filled up

The last morning of November

The Town in Bloom , Dodie Smith
Crocodile on the Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters
Thursdays in the Park, Hilary Boyd
Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
Clouds of Witness , Dorothy L Sayers
Royal Harry, William Mayne
Shrinking Violet , Karina Lickorish Quinn
The Secret Keeper , Kate Morton
The Ghosts that Come Between Us , Dr. Bulbul Bahuguna
Re-reads: several books by Posy Simmonds plus The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and Pink Sugar by O Douglas
( thoughts )

I was alerted by coughingbear to the death of
Eva Ibbotson, whose books I enjoy so much. There’s an obituary here. People may be interested to know that The Persephone Post is featuring her all this week. It was wonderful how she managed to keep writing so well at such a great age and I'm sorry there won't be any more from her.

I’ve already written quite a lot about Eva Ibbotson’s enjoyable romances. I’ve just read for the first time The Morning Gift. Lovely, lovely, lovely. The main characters are very similar to those in Magic Flutes but I liked this book better. Ruth has had a privileged childhood at the heart of Vienna’s intelligentsia but then comes the Anschluss and that way of life is over. There’s only one way for her to leave Austria: a marriage of convenience to Quin, an English professor. (This is not a spoiler, you can read it on the book cover.) But Ruth is committed to Heini, a musical prodigy. How will Ruth and her family cope with life in exile in London? And how will she choose between Quin and Heini? Finding out is pure pleasure.

A Song for Summer I first read years ago. I remember very well that it was a slim paperback aimed clearly at an adult readership. It’s now been repackaged to match some of her other books published as Young Picadors ‘for older readers’, i.e. teens. I can well imagine a teenage girl enjoying this book (as I did) but it’s very different from the others. Ellen, the heroine, is no quicksilver, slightly fey character. With her love of domestic order, her rejection of an intellectual life for one of nurturing others, she’s more like someone in a book by Rumer Godden or Elizabeth Goudge. The story begins just before the war when Ellen goes to work as a matron at a progressive school in Austria where dogma is more important than common sense. Ellen soon sorts out the more difficult children, cleans the place up, improves the food and generally makes herself indispensable. She also meets Marek, a typically Ibbotson rather-too-perfect hero. Innumerable difficulties and misunderstandings come between the pair, as we expect in an Ibbotson novel; not least the outbreak of war. As usual, it’s the descriptions of places which make this such a charming story.

I think my favourite Ibbotson stories are The Star of Kazan and The Secret Countess but any one of them is perfect for when you want ‘a nice book’.

I seem to have improved my average this month; it's a lot to do with having books you're really keen to read. Yesterday I set off for the library full of hope, picturing myself coming home with a pile of books but I returned with nothing.

Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon
This is the first Brunetti book so I’m reading them well out of order. I missed characters like Vianello and Signorina Elettra (sp) who appear in the later novels. I also spotted surprising inconsistencies. In this first book, Brunetti is a grump in the mornings and his wife Paula is up and running and together; in the other books I’ve read it’s Paula who has trouble getting up and Brunetti who is relentlessly, irritatingly cheerful in the mornings. Brunetti is investigating the death of a world famous conductor who is very similar to Jilly Cooper’s evil maestro, Ranaldini (see Score and other novels). Unfortunately on page 172 I guessed what had happened, so the rest of the book was just fill-in.
( more books )

Does Eva Ibbotson write for children or for adults? I’d say A Song for Summer (lovely book) is for adults and The Secret of Platform 13 for children. The two novels I’ve just read come somewhere between the two and I’d categorise them as romances; romances strongly influenced by Georgette Heyer.


In A Company of Swans Harriet is the daughter of a Cambridge professor who leaves her upbringing to his mean spirited, narrow-minded sister and refuses to let the brilliant girl go to Girton. These two are pantomime figures, a pair of Murdstones. Harriet is well trained in classics but has another secret love: the dancing classes she is allowed to attend each week. She is offered a place in a Russian touring ballet company which her father of course refuses for her and so she rebels. This is all highly unlikely since she is eighteen and has never danced on stage but the author knows this and explains it away.

The hero, Rom, one of Ibbotson’s brilliant but rebellious misfits, is impossibly handsome, brave, athletic, clever – and rich. So, like a true Heyer hero, he is able to act above the law and fix things to be the way he wants them. Here’s an example of the Heyerish-ness. Harriet wants to speak to Rom but finds her intentions misunderstood; to his great disappointment Rom sees her as just another dancing girl and she finds herself being groomed for the bedchamber. Expecting to be ‘ruined’, as she puts it, she says, ‘I don’t know what to do’. He realizes she is virtuous, then
‘(she) lifted her face with perfect trust to his.
Which made it difficult for Rom to do what he intended…But he mastered himself…And his voice suddenly rough, “No breath of scandal shall touch you while I live”.
See? Pure Heyer.

The other day I noticed this book in a ‘three for two’ display of children’s books in W H Smith’s. I wouldn’t buy this for a ballet-mad eight year old as there is quite a lot of (pure and non-explicit) sex in it. A lovely romance for older girls, though.

I loved A Secret Countess so much that I read it almost at a sitting. Another Heyer-eque romance, I’d say. Anna is an aristocratic Russian exile forced to earn her living. Rupert has returned from the (First World) war to take over the earldom and estate he inherited when his elder brother was killed. There are shades of Lord Peter Wimsey here when the butler says, ‘there’s no doubt who was the finer gentleman’. Rupert has been inveigled into a promise of marriage to one of the nastiest women you could ever hope to read about but his sense of honour will not allow him to break the engagement. Will true love conquer all? If you know your Heyer, you know the answer.