Autumn Cooking, Smith College Relief Unit Style
We all joke about cooking with pumpkin in October, but guess what? The Smith College Relief Unit was doing it, too, back in 1917! They might be afflicted with rationing and war bread, but the Smith College Relief Unit found themselves the object of relentless invitations to dinner from neighboring groups of lonely American and…
Read MorePink Carnation Revisited
It’s been five years now since I wrapped up the Pink Carnation series with The Lure of the Moonflower, which sometimes feels like the blink of an eye and others like an awfully long time. For the most part, the Pink characters have left me be while I’ve been writing other things. Every now and…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
The rain is pouring down today in proper Gothic fashion making today the perfect sort of day to stay in and read ghost stories. (I can totally just not pick up the kids from their schools, right?) This week, I continued my Miss Silver marathon, with the rather disappointing The Vanishing Point, but made up…
Read More“Take the blessés to the camion”: a Smithie Lexicon
The women of the Smith College Relief Unit were all changed by their experience in France– and so was their prose. Reading the letters of the Smithies in France and their compatriots, the American ambulancemen and aviators, one of the things that jumps out is the zippy new dialect they all adopt, an enthusiastic mix…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all! My new book kick continued this week with another read-in-one-sitting Riley Sager novel, Final Girls, a riff on the traditional college girl slasher story– but with a great deal of twist. I am not a fan of slasher movies. I prefer the classic ghost story, tingle on the back of the neck…
Read MoreThe Smith College Relief Unit in October– October 1917, that is!
As you probably know by now, my upcoming book, Band of Sisters, is about the Smith College Relief Unit, eighteen determined Smith alums who went off to the front during World War I to bring aid to French villagers on the front lines, women and children whose homes had been destroyed by the Germans. So…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy October, all! It’s been a week of knitting spinster detectives for me, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver (you wonder– would the two be besties or suspect each other on sight?). I started the week At Bertram’s Hotel, in which the illusion of Edwardian comfort masks a darker reality in…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all! I have a richness of books lined up (I feel like like Scrooge McDuck about to leap into his money pool every time I look at my Kindle screen– it’s all I can do not to just gloat over it), but what with one thing and another I wound up with very…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all! My reading roll continued this week with Steph Dray’s The Women of Chateau Lafayette, set around three women who all lived in the home of the legendary Revolutionary War hero in three different eras: Lafayette’s wife in the 18th century; New York socialite, artist, and humanitarian Beatrice Chanler in World War I;…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
It’s been a very strange first week after Labor Day, hasn’t it? It’s that odd “no time but possibly any time and which season is it again?” feeling of the pandemic. I’m going to have to up my pumpkin-themed baking and ghost story consumption to make it feel like fall! On the plus side, it’s…
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