Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
This week I started out with Melissa Albert’s The Children, which cleverly isn’t quite what you think it’s going to be. The story involves the children of the author of a beloved series of children’s books (the author tragically dead young, the books unfinished) in which they played the starring roles. So… did they really slip into a Narnia-like place as children? The answer is more complicated than that….
Jostling along with the crowds at Versailles last week, I found myself seized with the need to reread Rosalind Laker’s To Dance With Kings, her epic saga of four generations of women all linked to the great palace. I was obsessed with it as a pre-teen but hadn’t really revisited the book since. My first thought was that this would never sell today: so much telling instead of showing, so many info dumps, so much “I have seen you and now I love you always!”, so much just happening to be a front row witness of every single major historical event (“oh dear, I took a wrong turn in the garden and is that a secret transaction that will shake the throne of France taking place in that grove?”). My second thought was that I still couldn’t put it down and that this was how I’d fallen in love with history, living it along with fictional characters placed into real events.
After having lived through the Revocation of Nantes and the French Revolution, I needed a break from high drama, so I went back to small English villages with Miss Silver in The Vanishing Point and The Benevent Treasure, books 25 and 26 in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver mysteries.
What have you been reading this week?
I’ve been reading The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye and adoring it…discovering her historicals has derailed all my end-of-summer reading plans (in the best way)!
To Dance with Kings sounds awesome, adding to my (ever growing) TBR list!
Now back to 19th century India…
To Dance With Kings sounds right up my street but will have to it off for now. After reading Mrs. Spy and The Spy and the Snake I have gone back to an old favourite in Mrs. Pollifax. Thanks again for the rec for Mrs Spy books.
I’ve always thought that people reluctant to read history should be given some historical fiction as like a little taster to see what they’re missing. I’m reading an arc of the newest Alice Hoffman, ‘The Witches of Cambridge,’ which is exactly what you expect from Alice Hoffman, with a little dark academia thrown in. I hope the second half is a little darker and less samey.