Tag: Furrowed Middlebrow

WWW Wednesday

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

You might be wondering why I’m not posting as often as I used to. Well, the answer is that I got caught up with myself in reading, and instead of being several months of books ahead of myself, I’m only about two weeks ahead, so I decided first not to post on Wednesdays except for special reasons, and then a little later, when the situation did not improve, not to post on Fridays. This situation will be fluid, like it has been since I started blogging. If I get way ahead of myself again, I’ll start posting on Fridays. I like being ahead on my reading, because it allows me to choose more carefully the order of books instead of having to review the next book I read.

Anyway, the Chocolate Lady is always doing bloggy type activities where she joins with other folks, and I don’t usually have time. Plus some of them take some planning. But she is occasionally doing WWW Wednesdays (I don’t know what WWW stands for, and she doesn’t explain), which seemed like an easy thing to take part in. If you want to take part, you just have to answer three questions: What are you reading now? What did you recently finish reading? What will you read next?

What am I reading now?

Right now, I am reading a Dean Street book from their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, Family Ties by Celia Buckmaster. This gives me an opportunity to lobby for Dean Street publishing more Furrowed Middlebrow books. I know they are tied up in estate issues now, but I hope they will reconsider closing down this imprint. If you want them to continue with Furrowed Middlebrow maybe send them a message on their Facebook page, and please comment here! I am only a few pages into this book, and so far it seems to be about eccentric family life in a village. I always enjoy relaxing with a Furrowed Middlebrow book!

Technically speaking, I am also reading Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. I chose this book to read for the 1937 Club (coming up next week), but so far I just haven’t been able to hack it. It is supposed to be his masterpiece, and it is about a grown man who gets turned into an 11-year-old boy and put back in school. If that sounds juvenile, it is. I got into it about 70 pages and put it aside. Every time I finish another book, I look at it and say “Nah!”

What did I recently finish reading?

The last book I read was The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara, which is part of my Pulitzer Prize project. One of my habits, maybe it’s a foible, is just to check the library periodically to see which books in my projects are available and get them without reading what they’re about. And in fact, I do the same thing with all the books in my stack. At some point I have usually read what they are about but I don’t do that right before I begin reading them. Well, for this book, the timing was unfortunate, because it is a dystopian novel, and not only do I not usually read dystopian novels, but it seems like recently everyone is writing them. And, in fact, I had read three just in the past few weeks. Now, don’t get me wrong, one of them was wonderful, as you’ll find out when I review it. I didn’t have as positive of an experience with The Immortal King Rao, although I didn’t dislike it. You’ll have to wait for my review, which should be coming up in a couple of weeks.

What will I read next?

When I troll the libraries for my project books (online, of course), I usually try to get one for each of my projects, although often I cannot find the Walter Scott Historical Fiction project books there and have to buy them. (That means they go into my pile and I get to them a lot later. I should do something about that. The Bee Sting has been there for quite a while.) Last time I trolled, I ended up with The Immortal King Rao for my Pulitzer project and Real Life by Brandon Taylor and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch for my Booker Prize project. (I am still waiting for After Sappho by Shelby Wynn Schwartz to arrive for my James Tait Black Project.) I have read Prophet Song, so after I finish my current book, I’ll read Real Life. As usual, I have no idea what it is about. I hope it’s not dystopian.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think?

Review 2313: Kate Hardy

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I usually like D. E. Stevenson’s novels for very light reading, but Kate Hardy seemed all over the place.

Old Quinings is a village that has been left in the past, and the residents like it that way. They are interested to learn, though, that Mr. Morven has sold the Dower House. The new owner is Kate Hardy, a writer of adventure stories who has been yearning to get out of London and away from her selfish sister and spoiled niece.

Kate has bought the Dower House sight unseen, but she loves it as soon as she sees it, even the resident ghost. She meets Mr. Morven early on, but he is careful to visit only rarely because he is old-fashioned and married, although he and his wife live apart.

Kate doesn’t mean to be a recluse even though she needs time to write, and she gets involved in all kinds of things. When she barely knows Mr. Morven, she receives an anonymous letter alleging an improper relationship between them. Another letter goes to Mrs. Morven, who comes back from America hoping her husband wants a divorce. Then Kate arranges to take care of the couple’s nine-year-old daughter Susan, which is an odd offer to a stranger and even odder for the stranger to accept. Susan arrives, but we hardly spend any time with her.

In a gesture that seems sweepingly condescending, Kate also gives a party to welcome back Mrs. Stack’s son Walter from his service in India even though she has just met Mrs. Stack and doesn’t know Walter. There’s a class issue here, not only because of the invitation but because Walter has bettered himself in the service but is stubbornly insisting on keeping his promise to take back his old job and take care of his mother. His old mates are resentful of his getting his job back, although that was promised when he went to war, and his mother and Kate think he could do better.

Then there is the witch plot, which is just silly.

I think there is too much going on in this novel. Maybe the whole thing with the witches was meant to give atmosphere, but it just seemed sort of thrown in, as does the presence of Mr. Morven’s daughter. Also, Kate ends up with two suitors without us having much of a sense of what they are like. I noticed in addition a couple of occasions when Stevenson tells us what people talked about without recounting the dialogue—and the dialogue gives us a better sense of what people are like. Its not very convincing to be told a character’s views are interesting instead of learning what they are or hearing the character say them.

So, I don’t think that this was one of Stevenson’s best.

On the old subject of mistakes in the Furrowed Middlebrow series, which we haven’t encountered in a while, Mrs. Stack is called Mrs. Stark on the back cover of the book, and there is a section after the novel ends that was apparently written by Stevenson but in my copy appears to be missing pages, because it has no heading and starts in the middle of a sentence.

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Review 2303: Alice

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Margaret admires her best friend, Alice, even from their days at school. She thinks Alice is beautiful and elegant and envies her her siblings. However, Alice’s sister Sonia disillusions Alice early by leaving home with a man and turning up at school to demand Alice give her her monthly allowance.

As the two naïve and protected girls emerge into womanhood, Margaret comes to understand that Alice is afraid of life and has no confidence in its success. After Sonia steals the boy that’s been courting Alice, she tries to commit suicide and then incautiously marries Cassius, the man who saves her, when she hardly knows him.

Although the marriage is clearly ill-advised, to Margaret Alice lives a much more exciting life than her own. Still, Margaret notices how suggestible Alice is to those giving bad advice, even people she used to avoid.

Although this novel, about young women in the upper echelons of society, works as a social satire, it also has a serious message about what happens to unprepared young women thrown into society, especially in the years between the wars, when mores where changing.

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Review 2282: #DeanStreetDecember! Company in the Evening

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I finally could fit a book for Dean Street December into my schedule! This event is being hosted by Liz of Adventures in Reading, Running, and Working from Home.

In 1940 London, Vicky is fairly satisfied with her life. Five years ago, in the midst of divorcing her husband Raymond for infidelity, she discovered she was pregnant. But she is getting along fine raising her daughter Antonia with the help of an old family retainer, Blakey. She works three days a week as a literary agent and devotes the other days to Antonia. She is an independent woman who doesn’t feel the need for company except for an occasional visit or outing and dislikes sentiment and receiving sympathy.

However, she finds herself inviting company when her mother tells her she’d like to sell her house and move in with her sister. The problem is what to do about Rene, Vicky’s widowed and very pregnant sister-in-law, who has little money and no family and lives with Vicky’s mother. Vicky has a spare room and feels she owes it to her mother to offer Rene a place to stay, even though she and Rene have almost nothing in common. She has no desire to invite her, but she does.

Soon enough, she becomes convinced that they are incompatible. Her efforts to get along with Rene usually end up being misunderstood. Worse, Blakey dislikes her. She is always brusque, but to Rene she is sometimes disrespectful.

Then Vicky runs into Raymond. The other woman returned to her husband, and Raymond is just recovering from a bout of tuberculosis and hopes to take a desk job in the army. They begin occasionally spending time together.

This novel takes a thoughtful look at marriage and at Vicky’s preconceptions of how marriage should be as she takes another look at what broke up her own. It is an intelligent, witty, and involving story. I liked it very much.

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Review 2208: The Foolish Gentlewoman

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When crusty, prim Simon Brocken goes to live with his widowed sister-in-law Isabel while his home is repaired from bomb damage shortly after World War II, he isn’t expecting to enjoy living so closely with other people. However, the household gets along comfortably together even though the four occupants don’t have much in common. Isabel is kind and generous, although Simon thinks she’s an idiot. Her Australian nephew Humphrey has come to stay, and he is slowly pursuing an understated courtship of Jackie, Isabel’s companion/secretary.

However, something is bothering Isabel, and eventually she tells them what it is. A preacher’s sermon about bad acts in the past being no less bad has made her consider an incident from when she was a girl, when her actions blighted the marital hopes of Tilly Cuff, a poor cousin her family treated a little like a servant. Tilly took a job as governess, and Isabel eventually married Simon’s brother.

Now Isabel thinks she must make amends to Tilly, so she has invited her to stay. But she also intends to give Tilly her entire fortune. Simon is appalled by this but can’t get her to change her mind. Then Tilly arrives, and everyone but Isabel soon realizes that she is actively malicious.

This novel is witty and sharply observant of human nature. It creates a situation that I couldn’t imagine being resolved neatly and that made me want to see what happens.

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Review 2200: Near Neighbours

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The last book I read before this one was This Mournable Body, and after reading that, I felt in need of something light. So I skipped through my queue until I found this book, and it answered the purpose very well.

Unlike the other Clavering works I’ve read, which were set in small towns or villages in the Scottish borderlands, Near Neighbours is set in Edinburgh, in a once-exclusive neighborhood where stately homes are being split up into flats. The two surviving single-family homes are next to each other.

In one, elderly Miss Dorothea Balfour has been dominated all her life, first by her father and then by her older sister. But now her sister is dead, and Miss Balfour has just begun to realize that her life is her own. Still, she is lonely, as her sister considered them to be socially above their neighbors. However, she has always been interested in the activities next door, where the Lenox family, a widow with five grown or nearly grow children, live.

Young Rowan Lenox notices Miss Balfour at the window one day and decides to call on her to offer condolences. She finds the house gloomy but gets along with Miss Balfour well and invites her to tea. Everyone likes her and soon there are friendly visits back and forth.

The three oldest Lenox girls have a romantic concern. Willow is married, but because her husband is in the navy and is often away, she still lives at home. Her mother wishes they would get their own place, and Rowan is disturbed to notice Willow spending a lot of time with Mickey Grant while Archie is away.

Hazel Lenox is a level-headed nurse who is surprised to learn that the hospital heartthrob, Adam Ferrier, approves of her. He even asks her out a few times but then informs her he needs to concentrate on his career as a surgeon. Hazel hadn’t realized until then that she cares for him.

Rowan’s new Highland Dance partner is a brooding Byronic type but the best dancer in the class, Angus Todd. He is sensitive about his lack of background, being adopted, but shows an alarming tendency to be possessive of her, while she thinks of him as a friend.

Miss Balfour is surprised to receive a call from a strange man, who turns out to be the brother-in-law her sister split from six months after she married him. Mr. Milner seems not quite reputable, and Charles Frasier, Miss Balfour’s solicitor, is alarmed because the sister left her entire estate in such a way that Mr. Milner could lay claim to all of it. Through Miss Balfour, Charles meets the Lenoxes and is struck by Rowan.

The novel is a pleasant story about nice people with few real surprises, but the characters are interesting and you want to know what happens to them.

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Review 2098: Yoked with a Lamb

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After reading several Clavering books, I’ve decided that one of her strengths is in depicting a warm family and village life. It comes slowly in Yoked with a Lamb.

The village of Haystown in Southern Scotland is shocked and excited to learn that the Lockharts are returning to the area—all of them, including Andrew, who ran off with another woman several years ago. Andrew and Lucy are trying again and moving back to his beloved home. Lucy Lockhart has asked Andrew’s cousin, Kate Heron, to oversee preparations to open the house.

Although Lucy and the children are supposed to arrive there before Andrew, one day he stops by on his way north. Kate spends some time with him and his good friend Robin Anstruther. She begins to be attracted to Robin when she learns that he also was madly in love with the woman Andrew ran off with.

Kate thinks Andrew has treated Lucy abominably, but as the family gathers, she sees that Lucy constantly finds fault with him and throws his past in his face. She also tends to boss her children around and deprive them of small pleasures for no apparent reason. As Andrew and Lucy try to work out their problems, Kate tries to deal with her feelings for Robin.

I am enjoying the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints of Molly Clavering’s work very much. She was a neighbor and friend of the better-known D. E. Stevenson, but I have found Clavering’s books slightly more substantial.

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Review 2088: Mrs. Tim Flies Home

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I intended to read the Mrs. Tim books in order, but that hasn’t quite worked out, and I received this one just in time for Dean Street Press in December.

Hester Christie (Mrs. Tim) reluctantly leaves her husband in Kenya, where he is now posted, to form a household in England that her children can return to for the summer holidays. But en route she stops for two days in Rome. There she is unexpectedly met by family friend Tony Morley. Her couple days of sightseeing with him create a misunderstanding that travels all the way back to England to cause trouble for her through the person of Mrs. Alston, whom she met on the plane from Kenya to Rome.

Mrs. Tim has found a house in Old Quinings called the Small House. Although she loves the house, she finds she has a troublesome back neighbor and a landlady who isn’t to be trusted. She also meets some pleasant neighbors and helps out a young man in his romance with a nice young girl. She solves a mystery and finds out why some of the villagers are treating her oddly.

This book is another breezy entry in the Mrs. Tim series, written in the form of letters to her husband. It gets a little patronizing toward the ancient Romans (conveniently forgetting about the Inquisition), but they’re dead so they won’t mind. Otherwise, it’s an entertaining read.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2084: Babbacombe’s

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I asked Dean Street Press to rush me some books so that I could participate in Dean Street Press in December, and they have responded beautifully. Here’s a review of a book I received on Tuesday.

Beth Carson is a little disappointed after leaving school with high honors to take the job her father has arranged at Babbacombe’s, the large department store where he’s been employed for 30 years, instead of going to secretarial school. However, money has always been tight in the Carson household, and she is eager to help contribute.

Despite things being tight, the family is reluctant to take on a paying guest—George’s orphaned niece, Dulcie. But George feels guilty about neglecting her even though he didn’t like her father. When Beth goes to the railway station to collect her, she meets a nice young man after she is tripped up by his dog.

Dulcie turns out to be an unpleasant surprise for the family, but Beth finds herself enjoying her job in the dress department, even though it is at first exhausting. Then one day she is stuck in the elevator with the man from the railway station and finds out he is David Babbcombe, the boss’s son. When Beth learns he doesn’t work but collects an allowance from his father, she says she’d be ashamed to take money she didn’t earn.

Smarting from this, David, who threw away an opportunity at Babbacombe’s once already, goes to his father’s office and asks for a position. His delighted father starts him at the bottom this time instead of the top—in the meat department. He also has a secret from his father, he has submitted plans for a plane he designed to the government.

As David pursues Beth, her scruples interfere. Her father believes people should stay in their places, and she is sure Mr. Babbacombe wouldn’t approve of David dating one of his shop girls. Also not helping is Dulcie, who has decided she wants to marry David.

I’m having an inconsistent reaction to Scarlett’s work, probably because I don’t read too many straight romances. Although I liked another of her Cinderella stories, Clothes-Pegs, I often find the devices meant to keep the couple apart until the end are a little clumsy. In this case, Beth is almost stupidly obsessed by what their fathers will think, and Mr. Babbacombe’s confusion of the two girls doesn’t seem like him at all. Also, it seems to be a trope with Scarlett’s plots to involve a jealous, mischief-making other woman, which is a 50’s cliché. Still, this is pleasant light reading.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2082: Mrs. Lorimer’s Quiet Summer

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Liz of Adventures in Reading announced Dean Street Press in December long after I read this book, and the press is trying to get some new books to me in time, but since this one came up in my regular review schedule, I’ll take credit for it!

Because she has been trying to talk her husband Jack into buying it, Mrs. Lorimer is disappointed to learn that a nearby home, Harperslea, has been sold. Now that all their children except Guy are married, and some of them have children, their home, Woodside, is not big enough when they all come to visit, which they are doing this summer. With all the income from her writing, they can afford to move, but Jack refuses to consider it. So, her good friend Gray Douglas, also a writer, will help her out by putting some of the guests up.

Mrs. Lorimer, who tends to be a worrier, is also worried about her son Guy. He has been mentioning a girl quite often in his letters, but Mrs. Lorimer is worried that she won’t be good enough for Guy.

At any rate, when the family shows up, Phillie seems to be the one with the problem. She begins behaving temperamentally, being rude to her husband, dashing off to Harperslea because she’s seen Miss Smellie, one of the new occupants, playing tennis and she wants a game. Then bringing Miss Smellie home to dinner and just abandoning her to her mother and Guy.

Miss Smellie is young and not very prepossessing, and they find out she hates her name, which is Nesta Rowena. So, the family dubs her Rona.

These and other family concerns enliven this charming novel. The novel cover claims the book is autobiographical, and it certainly has some likable and entertaining characters. So far, I have very much enjoyed the novels I’ve read by Clavering.

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