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?