The Sisters

Posted on July 30, 2011 by kaizerin

“Sisters are a shield against life’s cruel adversity.”
–Nancy Mitford

“But sisters ARE life’s cruel adversity!”
–Jessica Mitford

Imagine there were six Hilton sisters, instead of just two, and the Hilton family were English Peers, cousins to the Churchills. Now imagine that one of the sisters (Diana) left her Guinness-scion husband just a few years after their high-society wedding, to become the mistress of Oswald Mosley, the notorious head of the British Fascist movement, and another one (Unity) ran off to become an acolyte to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, a third sister, Jessica, elopes with a cousin (both still teenagers) and joins the Communist party; they first attempt to join the fight against Fascism in Spain, then jaunt off to the U.S. to establish Communist party cells there. Back in England, the eldest sister (Nancy) is publishing popular novels featuring thinly-veiled caricatures of her Nazi-loving sisters and other family members. A fifth sister, Pam, (“the boring one”) shies away from the spotlight, hiding on her farm, and the sixth, Deborah, marries into the ancient and noble Cavendish family, becoming an in-law to the Kennedy clan and eventually, the Duchess of Devonshire.

Two words: tabloid gold. These women make the Hiltons look like paparazzi-baiting amateurs–although, of course, the Mitfords were all just following their passions, going where their hearts led them, not seeking press attention. AHEM. And these were just a few of the scandals caused by those “madcap Mitford girls”. Mother Sydney complains, “Every time I see a headline that begins “Peer’s Daughter” I know one of you is in trouble again.”

After about 1935, every member of the family is on “non-speakers” with at least one other member, if not two or three. The parents’ marriage eventually crumbles under the strain of politics; David is loyal to England, but Sydney met that nice Mr. Hitler–he was so good to our Unity when she was ill, darling–and won’t hear a word against him. The Communist sister, Jessica, condemns her entire family as Fascists for not disowning Diana and Unity outright, completely disregarding their actual political stances and war efforts. Pam’s quiet life is disrupted by her husband’s frequent affairs; after their divorce, he goes on to have five more marriages–two of them to a pair of sisters, in succession. (Not Mitford sisters, fortunately, but still!) Several of the sisters prove to be gifted writers–Nancy is easily the most famous author of the group, but Diana, Deborah, and Jessica also published many novels, memoirs, and works of non-fiction. Jessica Mitford was proud to have her investigative journalism called “muck-raking”; she’s probably most famous in the U.S. for her classic expose of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death.

The book is neatly arranged chronologically and follows the entanglements of all the Mitfords’ lives, but there’s only so much one can wedge into a six-person biography, and each of these women, plus their parents and brother–oh, imagine being the lone Mitford boy amidst those tumultuous sisters!–easily deserves a volume apiece. I did take exception to the author’s overly-apologetic stance toward Diana and Unity–she flatly condemns Jessica for pilfering small items from wealthy friends, while breezing over Unity’s denouncement of friends to Hitler with a sort of “Well, that’s Unity for you!” attitude–even when Unity’s chattering nearly gets an old friend executed by the Reich. She repeatedly emphasizes that the Fascist-leaning members of the family couldn’t have foreseen the results of the war from their vantage point in the early 1930s, and that’s a fair point. But Sydney lived until 1963, and Diana until 2003, and neither ever revised her opinion of Hitler. (Unity did the correct thing and attempted to shoot herself the day war was declared between England and Germany; always the dimmest Mitford, she couldn’t even get this right. She lived on for a few more years, brain-damaged and dependent on her family, until complications from the head wound eventually did her in.)

Like so many families, the Mitfords emerged from the war irreparably broken. They lost many loved ones, and bitter divisions of opinion kept many of the surviving members apart. That’s what struck me most about the Mitfords–how stiff-necked they were, how headstrong in pursuing their own ends, regardless of the hurt they might cause; how unwilling they were, almost to a person, to forgive, to bend, to downplay their differences in an effort to maintain some kind of family life. Given my obvious distaste for the Fascists, you might think I sympathized with Jessica, but she comes off as an obnoxious little snot. I didn’t really like any of them very much, except Deborah, the youngest sister. The controversies stormed upon the family by her sisters influenced her as she grew up, and she was the only one still at home to watch the acrimonious dissolution of her parents’ marriage. She turned out much more considerate and kind than any other Mitford, and made the biggest effort to hold some semblance of family together.

Not liking the Mitfords isn’t going to stop me reading more about them, I hasten to add. I have two of Nancy’s novels on order at the library and two memoirs (from Jessica and Deborah) to follow. I’ll be interested to hear what they have to say for themselves.

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Basecamp Crypto

Posted on July 16, 2011 by kaizerin

We are well underway in our attempt to scale Mt. Stephenson–i.e., read Neal Stephenson’s massive, approximately 3600-page Baroque Cycle in one long go. Strictly speaking, The Baroque Cycle is eight novels printed in three volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, but we included Cryptonomicon in the project because its characters and themes are extensions of those in the (don’t-call-it-a) trilogy. The Baroque Cycle is an exploration of the historical moment (which lasted most of a century) when the foundations of modern science and finance were laid. Cryptonomicon deals with the intersection of money and technology some 300 years on.

Cryptonomicon follows two story lines, one set during World War II and the other in the late 1990s, which interweave to tell a story about cryptography and the invention of the digital computer. The primary WWII characters are Bobby Shaftoe, Marine, and Lawrence Waterhouse, Mathematician. Their paths cross in Detachment 2702, an Ultra-Magic Secret (miles above Top Secret) operation designed to prevent the Axis powers from realizing the Allies have broken their codes. Essentially, the Allies know everything their enemies are planning, but if they show up at just the right spot to blow up every u-boat convoy or counter every move Rommel makes in North Africa, the Axis powers will figure out why they’re so well-informed and switch codes, shutting off the Allies’ main source of information. To allow them to take advantage of the information without tipping their hands, Lawrence plots clever ruses to disguise the improbability of the Allies’ “luck”, and Bobby leads the men who carry them out–whether by planting fake dead spies with waterproof packets of disinformation in the ocean, mocking up snipers’ nests to be ‘discovered’, or allowing American code books (cracked by the Nazis, but we don’t want them to know how we know that) to fall into enemy hands.

In the 1990s, Bobby’s son, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, and granddaughter, America (Amy) Shaftoe, are marine salvage operators in the Philippines. They get into business with Lawrence’s grandson, Randall Waterhouse, when he hires them to survey the floor of Manila Bay for his telecom business venture. What they find sends the crew into a much bigger adventure than mere data lines into the Philippines: there’s an experimental Nazi rocket-sub full of gold sitting on the floor of the bay. A blown hatch indicates that someone managed to get off the sinking wreck; furthermore, documents brought up indicate that someone on the sub had a connection to Randy’s family.

The modern-era characters plunge into treasure-hunting (the gold in the bay is the merest fraction of a massive hoard hidden deep in the jungle), while battling nefarious conspiracies, a lawsuit-happy business partner and his (literally) feral lawyer, who has a long, bitter history with Randy. Additionally, Randy digs into his grandfather’s past, trying to uncover his connection to whomever was on the sub–and along the way, finds clues to the treasure in the jungle.

There are two relatively major characters who appear in both timelines, one a mastermind lurking in the story’s shadows, and the other who is its beating, bleeding heart. Enoch Root is a curiously-unplaceable (in accent, attitude and intent) priest who nurses Bobby Shaftoe back to health after a battle, and later shows up in association with Detachment 2702. Enoch’s motives are murky and tied to a secret society to which he shows greater allegiance than to the church, but he’s generally helpful to Bobby. He is also a mysterious figure who engages Randy Waterhouse in discussions of cryptography, business ventures, motives, and conspiracies–again manifesting at just the right moment to lend a hand to our hero. In both story lines, Enoch seems to have a lot of knowledge about secret things, with no obvious explanation of how he came by it. And when he finally puts in an appearance in the 1990s timeline, he seems very much unchanged from the Enoch we’ve gotten to know in the 1940s. Curious, that.

Goto Dengo is a poetically-inclined Japanese soldier who barely survives his terrible war experiences. He’s shipwrecked, washing up with a handful of shipmates onto an island inhabited by vipers and cannibals; Dengo alone survives, and only by chance. Finally rescued (too strong a word for it, really–retrieved, perhaps?), he is enslaved to design and dig a massive crypt-complex that will be the last resting place of the treasure of the falling Empire of Nippon–and very nearly, of Goto Dengo. He is saved by his intelligence, foresight, and the fact that he has been painfully stripped of many of the illusions he held before he went to war. (He sees his loss of faith as his unmaking, but in truth, it’s his salvation.) By the time Randy and his friends propose to excavate the crypt, we have a deep emotional connection to it; we have felt the human cost of its creation. As it happens, the firm with the expertise and capacity to open up the crypt is none other than Goto Engineering, and its elderly but still-hale founder has hard questions about why Randy’s team wants to dig up this particular grave. Goto Dengo wrings my heart again and again; he is the most humane character in the book, suffering so much, and withstanding it all with such heart and humility…I’m tearing up now. He’s simply a lovely, profound character.

One of my favorite things about this book is how knowing snippets from one timeline ratchets up the tension in the other–we know about the sunken sub early on, so when, in 1945, characters we care about propose to steal the sub and make their way to the Philippines, I wanted to shout at them not to do it. We don’t find out until very late in the book who the lone survivor was, and that question alone would have been enough to pull me along to the end, had I needed pulling. I didn’t — the whole thing is a rip-snorting, Nazi-fighting, code-breaking, treasure-hunting adventure, in my opinion. But Stephenson does like to burrow into some detailed rat holes–technical computer discussions, the inner workings of pipe organs, the specifics of a playing card-based crypto system–and a reader not interested in plumbing those depths might get bored. Someone once told me he thought the book would have been much better with about 200 pages cut out of it–specifically, those boring, rambling, detailed discursions into math and cryptography. It’s a valid opinion, though one I flatly disagree with: I believe those digressions are the point of the book–the adventure stories are just there to lead us from one to the next. That’s one of the things about reading Stephenson–he expects you to do some work to keep up with him, he’s not going to just spoon-feed you a story. I choose to be flattered by what this implies about Stephenson’s estimation of my intelligence, but I certainly understand that it’s not what every reader is looking for from their fiction. It’s not even what I want, all the time: I filled my down time between the first and second books with a little Harry Potter on audio, so I could just sit back and enjoy, no work required!

It should not surprise you to hear that Cryptonomicon is one of my all-time favorite books. I was already a fan of Stephenson when it came out, but more than any of his previous works, Cryptonomicon felt like Stephenson writing directly into the pleasure centers of my brain. It’s not perfect, by any means–it suffers from Stephenson’s tendency to write to his last plot bullet and then just stop, for one thing. As a heroine, Amy Shaftoe is not up to Stephenson’s usual standard; she’s fun to spend time with, but she’s no Eliza (Baroque Cycle); she’s not even a YT (Snow Crash). These flaws are so minor compared to the good things in the book, I really only mentioned them to let you know that I do maintain some critical ability in the face of a book that continues to sweep me off my feet after 12 years and four reads.

Now, on to Camp Quicksilver!

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No More Kings

Posted on July 4, 2011 by kaizerin

…but that doesn’t mean we don’t still have princesses–I mean, even Lady Liberty wears a diadem! So I thought I’d show you the birthday tiara I made for my dear friend Rachel’s birthday this year.

I don’t think you’re ever too old to enjoy being a princess on your birthday–I certainly don’t plan to ever outgrow it. A couple of years ago, I knitted Rachel a birthday crown, and decided I wanted to outdo that this year. I watched a few instructional videos, and then just went for it.

Honestly, I was shocked how well my first effort turned out. I’m crafty, but it usually takes a few tries for me to turn out something nice when I pick up a new craft. But this took about an hour and a half, and was even better than I’d visualized.

The problem was, I’d allowed myself a few weeks to learn and practice, which meant this pretty thing was sitting around the house, tempting me at every turn. I finally decided the only thing to do was to create one for myself, so I could stop wanting to steal Rachel’s.

I used the same construction techniques in both, and they ended up so different from each other. Of course, the color scheme of mine makes it much more somber–the whole thing was inspired by those red, pointed gems. Where Rachel’s clearly says, “Happy birthday, darling!” mine is more, “The Nazgûl have gone co-ed!”

To my credit (and Ken’s surprise) I haven’t run off and bought all the tiara supplies in the world, as I tend to do when I take up a new craft. But I do have an idea for a blue and green mermaid tiara with sort of Art Nouveau lines…

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Electronica

Posted on June 20, 2011 by kaizerin

All the reading I’m getting done while commuting is actually listening; I’m getting back into the audiobook habit. It’s a lot more convenient to switch on the iPod and go, rather than lugging a book along, having to stop reading it at transfer points and while walking. Plus, I get motion sick if I try to read in a moving vehicle. It’s much better to listen to the story while watching the environment around me.

I read most of Cryptonomicon via audiobook, supplemented with an ebook copy. I didn’t touch paper on this read–fitting, for a story that deals with the invention of the digital computer and modern cryptology. It wasn’t hard to switch back and forth between formats, and they each offered certain advantages. Below, a picture of what happened last time I read Cryptonomicon in paper.

Those are all notes about passages I liked, things I wanted to look up, and connections to the Baroque Cycle. With the e-reader, I can do an immediate dictionary or web search when I have a question, then continue the story. For passages I want to recall, there’s a highlight function–I can call up the list and click on any note to be taken right to the passage.

The advantage of the audiobook was the pace; slower than reading to myself, it forced me to listen and comprehend every word, no skimming, and no tuning out on the technical passages. When it got really complicated, I opened up the ebook and followed along as I listened, the visual information reinforcing the auditory. This is the first time I got a real grasp of how Van Eck phreaking works, for instance; on previous reads, I’d skimmed through that section and mentally filled in “then some techno-magic happens.”

It was also painful, in parts. There’s a scene where a character is struggling to escape a flooding mine; he gets stuck in a vertical shaft and nearly drowns. It’s a dark, claustrophobic, panic-inducing passage. I was on a train on my way to work, and could hardly breathe, I was so THERE with poor Goto Dengo. I had to keep looking around at all the lovely, open, breathable air all around me and focusing on how not-wet, not-confined, not-drowning I was. It’s a powerful moment in the story; almost overpowering when I couldn’t speed through to the end, but had to listen to every agonizing word of it.

Of course, there are drawbacks to electronic formats, too. I listened to The Poisoner’s Handbook last week, which was very entertaining, but I found it hard to remember the names of people mentioned because I hadn’t seen them in print. I pulled up reviews of the book until I found one that named the main characters, and that helped cement them in my mind. Similarly, when I’m recalling something I read in a book, I visualize where it was on the page; can’t do that with audiobook, and even the ebook is harder to do this with, as there’s no tactile indication of how far into the book the passage I want lies. I’ve always been a visual learner–there’s just something about being able to see the shape of a word that helps me process and recall it.

I didn’t have this problem with Cryptonomicon, because it was my fourth time through the book; the names were all familiar and matched up to word-forms already on file in my mind. As I get into the Baroque Cycle–only my second read, the first being some seven years ago–I expect to find it more challenging. It’ll be interesting to see how much I need to re-read passages electronically after listening to them.

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Spring Delights

Posted on June 12, 2011 by kaizerin

It’s mid-June and we’re finally getting weather that most of the country would recognize as Spring-like: mostly-sunny days in the low 70s, nights in the mid-50s. Now me, I didn’t mind how cold and wet it was in April and May; I love the rain, and I dread the onset of dry, hot summer weather. But I can be glad for the sun-lovers around me, and it does make the commute a little easier, not to be drenched the whole way there and back.

Our irises did a lot better this year, putting up four or five stalks with multiple flowers on each–still only on the north side of the sidewalk, though, for reasons we don’t understand yet. These, if you’ll recall, are the beds we created on Mother’s Day a couple of years ago and planted with free bulbs picked up off the street. We got several stalks of classic, purple iris…

…and then a surprise:

Baby blue irises! In my flower beds! You get what you pay for, I guess. Oh, all right, it’s pretty–and in certain lights, is almost a lavender-blue (dilly dilly). And at least it bloomed, unlike those slackers in the south bed.

The cold spring seems to have delayed the growing season a bit–at least, I think the kohlrabi is usually in at the farmers’ market before now. We went yesterday with high hopes, but no luck. We soothed our disappointment with a half-flat of succulent strawberries and a good-sized grab of rhubarb, which Ken combined into this delight:

Can you believe that’s his first-ever attempt at a lattice-crust? And it is delicious, lemme tell ya! Just enough cinnamon and brown sugar to bring it to the right side of tartness, barely. Whipped cream is only optional if you don’t mind puckering up. And the berries taste bright and fresh–it’s a mouthful of spring sunshine!

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Limbering Up

Posted on June 9, 2011 by kaizerin

We’re well into June, and that means the assault on Mt. Stephenson is underway— the Ascent Team has agreed to read Cryptonomicon in June, Quicksilver in July, The Confusion in August, and The System of the World in September. I’m tingling with anticipation of getting back into The Baroque Cycle after all this time! This means there’s going to be more blogging around this place soon, so I thought it would be a good idea to warm up with a few short posts before we head off into thin air with Neal Stephenson.

I’m a couple of weeks into an experiment with taking public transportation to work instead of driving. Gas prices are the proximate cause of this change, supported by the need for more reading time, the critical need for more regular exercise, and free-floating liberal guilt. I’m a Portlander, for pity’s sake; how can I justify driving a single-occupant vehicle 26 miles a day when there’s a Max station on the corner opposite my office building? Commuting takes planning, organization, a big time commitment (driving, my work day is 8:00-6:00; commuting makes it 7:00-7:00) and a certain amount of anxiety-control, given that being alone amidst a lot of strangers is challenging for me. On the upside, it forces me to walk a cumulative hour every day, plus the cardio I get on the stairs at Hollywood station (my doctor is SO pleased!), and once my tush is in a seat, I can just relax and read—someone else is worrying about the traffic. I’m powering through Cryptonomicon at a record pace, thanks to the extra hours of reading time in my week.

I’ve only managed to commute two days per week so far, and am trying to get to three. I’ve run the numbers, and with my workplace subsidy on bus passes, driving half the time and commuting the other half is the break-even point at current gas prices. I can commit to that. As I get more accustomed to it, and as gas prices continue to rise, it will be even more appealing.

I do, however, need to get some kind of stretching routine into place. So far, I haven’t been able to commute two days in a row because I’m so frickin’ sore and tired the day after I’ve done it. Doing stretches I remember from PE class isn’t cutting it, so I suppose I need to Google around for something more effective—recommendations, anyone?

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Corny

Posted on May 11, 2011 by kaizerin

Sometimes, a girl has a hat she doesn’t need.

A Derby Dame cast-off.

A hat that sits around gathering dust, waiting for an appropriate occasion.

Appropriate occasions are few and far between for this beauty.

Other times, a girl needs a hat she doesn’t have.

Is there any hat more dashing than a tricorn?

But with a little ingenuity, a needle & thread, and some pretty notions, an unneeded hat can become quite necessary, indeed.

Ribbon is re-used from original hat; cockade is from Etsy seller Clytemnestra's Closet.

And a good hat is all a clever girl needs to make a good day, don’t you find?

Avast, me hearties!

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Revisiting Books

Posted on April 2, 2011 by kaizerin

First, a note that I was feeling highly self-critical last week for not participating in Ada Lovelace Day, when I had such a great experience with it last year. I just didn’t have anything prepared or anyone in mind yet to write about. So imagine my joy to discover they’ve moved it to October this year! I’m not too late! It’s still Christmas Day! You, boy, go purchase that enormous goose…er, yes. Well. Now I just have to make good use of the 7-month extension, so I don’t end up rushing it out at the last minute. (Yeah…no bets, please!)

Another book I should probably read.

Do you ever feel guilty for re-reading a book, instead of using the time to read something new? “So many books, so little time,” as the tote bag says; and that being the case, how can we justify time spent re-reading anything? I heard a factoid a while ago that I have no factual back-up for, yet it rings true in a gut-check kind of way: That it would take a person fifteen years just to read the titles of all the books in the world. Or all the books in print. Or all the books printed in a year. It was something staggering like that. And while that could drive a devoted reader to despair–how will I ever read it all?–I found it liberating. If there’s really that much out there, well, I certainly can’t be expected to read everything that makes its way into print, no matter how beloved by the critics or the masses it may be.

I tend to be the readingest person a lot of people around me know, particularly among work acquaintances, and I sometimes feel a weird pressure to know and have read ‘everything’, because that’s the expectation people approach me with. I feel like I let them down when I haven’t read the one thing they’ve bothered to pick up this year. (Based on another factoid I have no actual data on, that the average American reads about one book a year. Gosh, I’m all about the sloppy evidence today!)

But if it’s not humanly possible to read everything, well, there’s that pressure off. I feel bad, sometimes, for getting as absorbed in genre fiction as I do, instead of reading ‘proper literature’, as if I’m only impersonating a well-read person. But hey, who’s to say I would ever get to Tolstoy or Proust, even if I devoted myself to the classical Western canon exclusively? If it were possible to read everything, I would feel pressured to do so; as it is not, I feel a good bit freer to read what pleases me, and leave the rest to history. Whew! I was really dreading Ulysses.

More than that, some books reward a second or third read. Look at what happened between my first and second reads of Moon Tiger. The story revealed so much more on the second read; it took on deeper meanings and broader dimensions. The book didn’t change between readings, but I did, and it made a huge difference to my understanding and enjoyment of the story. Perhaps it’s like driving to a new place: the first time you do it, you’re focused on reaching the destination. The next few times, you can look around a bit more at the scenery. Perhaps bits of the story tucked themselves into my subconscious after the first read and played around, taking on new faces and funny costumes, ready to leap out on second read and surprise me. Perhaps, like stepping into a river, it’s not possible to read the same book twice–although it’s you who are constantly flowing into new shapes and directions, not the book. It says something about how much the reader brings to a story, how much reading a book is a collaboration between reader and author.

We sense this on some level, I think. We want our friends to love the books we love, and we’re more than disappointed when they don’t: we feel a little rejected, as if we’ve had an argument with them. Or maybe it’s that we feel alienated, because we realize the books are the same; it’s the readers who must be different–possibly more different than we realized. It shakes our sense of affinity–but should we let it? If we get different results from reading a book twice, how much more of a difference should we expect from two different readers? No matter how well we know someone, we can’t know everything they bring into a reading experience–we barely understand what we’re contributing when we react strongly to a story, good or bad. This is one the great powers of books: to teach us something about ourselves. If we examine why we react to the story as we do, if we compare differences in ourselves between readings of the same book, we can learn a lot about what’s going on. So a book we love, a book we return to again and again: it’s not really about the book, is it? It’s about what the book is reflecting to us of ourselves.

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The Darkness and the Deep

Posted on March 20, 2011 by kaizerin

Completely by chance, I discovered a new writer I really enjoy, Aline Templeton. I was trying to recall a book I read years ago, and only had a few pieces of information, which is why I was searching lists of fictional Scottish detectives, which is how I discovered there’s a mystery series starring a DI Marjory Fleming! And she’s a police detective in a tiny Scottish fishing village–it almost had to be an homage to little Marjory Fleming, child poet, didn’t it? Well, I had to read one and find out.

Our library doesn’t have the first in the series, unfortunately, so I started with the second one, The Darkness and the Deep. When the Knockhaven lifeboat is wrecked returning from a rescue mission, it seems like a terrible, but common, tragedy for the fishing village. It looks like pilot error led to a horrible mistake: the lifeboat wrecked trying to enter the dangerous Fool’s Inlet instead of safe Knockhaven Harbor. But a sharp-eyed policeman spots something odd at the mouth of the inlet: a green beacon. Someone has set up guidance lights to make the mouth of the inlet mimic the opening to the harbor–someone has deliberately caused the wreck of the lifeboat, an almost unimaginable crime. DI Fleming and her team must figure out which of the victims was the actual target: the beautiful, adulterous doctor; the publican with a checkered past and a violent teenage stepson; or the suicidal high school teacher, just that day accused of molesting a student? Or could it be the on-duty pilot who should have been on the boat, but was replaced at the last minute because he was too high on drugs to make the run? Each victim has several potential suspects who might have wanted them dead, and the police will sort through a lot of scandalous village secrets until they turn up the motive for these murders. Worse yet, it quickly becomes apparent that the killer wasn’t satisfied with the lifeboat wreck, and terrible “accidents” continue to claim lives in Knockhaven.

I really enjoyed the book; I liked DI Fleming and her circle of friends, family, and colleagues quite a lot. It wasn’t too hard to get into the story starting on book two: events from the first book are still resonating in The Darkness and the Deep, and the author gives enough back story to help the reader make sense of it, without revealing the solution to that case–very smart writing. I didn’t figure out who the killer was; I had my money on one of the red herrings. I’m not sure Templeton actually gave us enough information to figure it out–the solution sort of popped up from left field. But I didn’t feel cheated, because the killer was one of the characters we’d been spending time with–we just hadn’t been there for the crucial moments, and didn’t get the last two bits of information until just after the police did. But I enjoyed the journey, and I will certainly seek out more of Templeton’s books.

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Alcott Again

Posted on March 10, 2011 by kaizerin

I extended my time with Louisa May Alcott by picking up two new-to-me titles: Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Together, they tell the story of Rose Campbell, an orphaned girl who goes to live with her father’s estranged family. Her legal guardian is her bachelor Uncle Alec, who gets much advice and interference from an assortment of aunts and great-aunts (aside from Alec and Old Mac, the uncles are all dead or shipped offstage for the majority of both books.) Eight Cousins opens with a shy and sickly Rose arriving at the ‘Aunt Hill’ from the boarding school where she’s been parked for the year following her father’s death. The school was doing its darnedest to make a fashionable lady of Rose, and she is accordingly high-strung, tight-laced, weak and frightened. Uncle Alec, a doctor (and the author’s mouthpiece), has his own notions about child-raising, and makes a deal with the Aunts: give him one year to raise Rose as he sees fit, and at the end of that time, if she isn’t greatly improved in health and heartiness, he will turn her over to them.

Naturally, Uncle Alec’s ideas are all excellent for Rose: he takes away her corsets so she can breathe enough to take exercise in the fresh air; her forbids her coffee and sweet rolls, substituting milk and plain brown bread; he arranges her training in the domestic arts, and in medicine, when she shows an interest in his work. He encourages her to join in the boisterous adventures of her seven boy cousins–riding, skating, sailing, playing soldiers, etc. He also nurtures her inclination to generosity, allowing her to ‘adopt’ Phoebe, a housemaid her own age. This sounded like a potential disaster to me, but Rose isn’t toying with Phoebe; she genuinely regards her as a sister, and sees to her education and eventual place in society.

Rose in Bloom picks up a few years later, when Alec, Rose, and Phoebe return from an around-the-world tour. Rose is now nineteen, a beautiful young woman about to come into the fortune her father left her. The whole town expects her make the best match she can (several of those rambunctious boy cousins are lining up to be considered for the honor) and settle right down. Rose, however, has seen a bit of the world, and intends to use her good fortune to help others. She isn’t going to settle into marriage and family until she makes her mark on the community as a philanthropist–and experiences a little of the social whirl she has denied herself until now. Her experiments meet with varied success–as do the romantic suits of the Campbell boys. Only one can win the prize, after all, and there are pitfalls and heartbreaks on the way to happiness for our Rose.

If I had read these books when I first discovered Alcott’s work, they might well be as dear to me as Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl. As it is, I enjoyed them–I’m pretty much always willing to let Louisa May bend my ear with her notions of modern womanhood–but I’m not likely to revisit Rose Campbell the way I do Jo March and Polly Milton. Rose’s author did quite well by her, and I’m content to leave her ensconced in her happily-ever-after.

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