christianreader | October Reading List (Reply)

Hi, I'm new! I'll probably post an introduction post later* but for now here's my October reading list for your entertainment. The rest of my 2009 book lists can be found here.

Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart

One of my favorite books of all time, so I jumped at the chance to re-read it for our book club this month. I love all of Mary Stewart's books, but NCW is something special, even from the opening lines.

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.

Linda Martin is hired as a governess for the 9-year-old Philippe, Comte de Valmy, and it quickly becomes apparent that the luxurious Chateau Valmy is a dangerous place for Philippe to be growing up. She falls hard for his dashing cousin Raoul, but can any of the Valmys be trusted when it becomes a matter of life and death?

Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey

I read this (and bought it) mostly for the cover, though I've also enjoyed several of the Once Upon a Time series (fairy tales re-told as young adult romances) in the past.

Winter's Child is a re-telling of The Snow Queen, and though it's not wonderful -- it would have benefitted from being twice as long so that the two romances could have been developed and not thrown in at the last minute -- some of Cameron Dokey's writing is beautiful. Not a book I want to recommend to everyone I see, but perfect for a snowy afternoon with a cup of hot cocoa to sip as you read.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

I've been hearing about this book and the movie inspired by it for years, and always assumed it was a love story. Instead it's a charming little book, easily read in an hour or two, made up of the letters between Hanff, a writer in New York, and the employees of a bookstore in London. At first polite and businesslike, the letters quickly become casual, and though they never meet the writers all come to regard each other as friends. No romance, and a slightly bittersweet ending, but very cozy nonetheless.

Dangerous by Charlotte Lamb

One of my book sale finds from September, I picked up this ancient Harlequin novel because the cover reminded me of the ones I used to read in junior high -- no sex, just cheesy romance. And it was dreadful, just as I'd suspected.

A nurse recovering from pneumonia takes a job as companion to the spoiled and willful granddaughter of a wealthy woman about to go to Paris. The girl's father is terribly, terribly alpha male and Greek, and doesn't trust women at all. The reasons for this are explained later, but unfortunately the romance never is -- on one page the heroine still hates him, and two pages later she's melting into his arms agreeing to marry him, even though nothing has changed. Very silly indeed.

The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne

I don't normally read "chick lit", as I can't relate to their whole Sex and the City vibe. But having enjoyed Hester Browne's fourth book, I thought I'd give her first series a chance.

Melissa Romney-Jones has just been fired for the umpteenth time from a job she didn't like. Desperate to earn some money and stop sponging off her flatmate Nelson, she comes up with the idea of starting The Little Lady Agency, where she'll use her knowledge of society and good manners to straighten out hapless bachelors. Wearing a blond wig and Marilyn Monroe-esque wardrobe she transforms every morning into Honey Blennerhesket, bossy bombshell.

One of her first clients is American businessman Jonathan Riley, who doesn't need his life straightened out so much as he needs a pretend girlfriend to ward off unpleasant questions about his messy divorce back in New York. As both Honey and herself Melissa falls for him, but doubts that someone suave and sophisticated could be interested in what's underneath the "Honey" facade.

Little Lady, Big Apple by Hester Browne

The second in the series finds Melissa about to lose her happy home -- Nelson is leaving for a few months and is using the time to have the flat renovated. At about the same time Jonathan's company sends him back to New York, and he asks her to come with him.

At first it seems like a dream come true, all the glitz and glamour of New York City, romantic dinners out, meeting Jonathan's American friends...but Melissa's friend and sister are running her Little Lady Agency into the ground, Jonathan wants her to give it up and start a party-planning agency instead, and his ex-wife remains a constant unpleasantness in the background. Add in a former schoolmate turned budding Hollywood star whose agent wants "Honey" to give him an image makeover, and poor Melissa spends most of the book feeling miserable.

The Little Lady Agency and the Prince by Hester Browne

Somehow Hester Browne never gets back the charm of the first Little Lady book in either of the sequels. In this one Melissa is trying to plan her wedding to Jonathan, her move to Paris, where he's now been transferred, and the end of her agency, and also do a favor for her grandmother who wants her to make over the playboy prince of a tiny Mediterranean kingdom. A twist near the middle only confirms what had been obvious since book 2, and Melissa gets her happy ending, only not quite the way she'd planned. I liked it but it wasn't as interesting as the first book.

Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn

The Honourable Miss Daisy Dalrymple is an independent young woman with a job writing about fancy old houses for Town and Country magazine. Her first assignment is Wentwater Court, chosen because she knows the family slightly, and it only takes a day for Daisy to notice all the underlying tension between the family and their guests. The slimy Lord Stephen Astwick seems to be at the root of it all...and then he turns up dead in the frozen skating pond. The police are all ready to call it an accidental death until Daisy's photographs show something mysterious about the way the ice was broken.

The real appeal of the book, and probably of the whole series, lies in Daisy's introduction to Scotland Yard detective Alec Fletcher, and their immediate rapport. Obviously there will be romance later, but in this first book they just become friends and solve the mystery together. It pretty much fits the definition of "cozy mystery", and I will most likely read more of the series in the future.

Legend in Green Velvet by Elizabeth Peters

Not as funny as I remembered, but still a good zany mystery-romance-comedy the way Elizabeth Peters does best. Young American Susan, whose passion for all things Scottish knows no bounds, finally gets the chance of a lifetime: a week to work on an architectural dig in the Highlands. Before she can even get there, though, she meets a crazy old man called Tammas who gives her a message in code, a muscular American named Ed Jackson whose bruising embrace distracts her while he searches her purse, and finally reluctant young laird Jamie Erskine in whose company she flees the scene of a murder. A wild chase across Scotland ensues as Susan and Jamie stay one step ahead of the police and try to not only solve the mystery, but to figure out what the mystery is in the first place.

Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart

Another of my favorites. Vanessa March is mad at her husband for cancelling their Italian getaway to spend a week in Sweden on business instead, but when she finds out he's not even in Sweden -- someone saw him on a newsreel story about a circus fire in Austria -- she's even madder. She agrees to escort a friend's son to Vienna so that she can find Lewis, but of course it's not as simple as it first appears. Instead of the harmless chemist she thought she'd married, Vanessa finds that her husband is actually a secret agent on the trail of someone in the circus who will stop at nothing to keep their crime undiscovered.

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Orphaned Maia is sent to Brazil to live with her only relatives, the unpleasant Carters. Being a typical Ibbotson heroine she's bright and passionate and deeply interested in things like music and art and nature, and having to live shut up in a frantically sanitized home eating only food that was shipped from England in cans and boxes, is a fate worse than death. Her friend and fellow orphan, the half-Indian boy Finn, asks her to help him escape from the detectives who want to drag him kicking and screaming back to England, and along with a young actor who has had to stop performing in shame after his voice broke while he was playing a 7-year-old, they come up with what seems like a foolproof plan. But poor Maia will still be stuck with the annoying Carters...or will she?

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

I've put off reading this forever because it seemed like one of those icky Nicholas Sparks-type books: overly sappy; with some Mitford thrown in for good measure: small-town people nosing around in each other's business and dispensing pearls of rural wisdom. But on our last Discard Day I read the first few pages and thought it seemed interesting, so I read it and it was really very good.

Writer Juliet Ashford isn't sure what to do with herself now that World War II is over and she can't make a living writing humorous columns of the "keep calm and carry on" type. She can't get excited about any ideas for books, especially since her biography of Ann Bronte wasn't well-received.

Then a letter from a man in Guernsey arrives, telling her that he had come across a book that used to belong to her and had her name and address written in the front. As they correspond Juliet is introduced to his friends, a group who call themselves The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and who used their literary discussions to keep up their morale during the German occupation of the island. Juliet becomes more and more enamored of this group (in some ways it's similar to 84 Charing Cross, with the letters and the deepening friendships between strangers) and eventually goes to Guernsey with the idea of writing a book about them.

It's a very simple story, and the depth lies in the letters and their writers, and the stories they have to tell. I was particularly fond of Isola Pribby, whose passion for gothic novels comes to a screeching halt when she discovers Jane Austen, and then demands to know why no one ever told her about Pride and Prejudice before???

*The short version: I like Bollywood movies, happy endings, romantic suspense and mystery novels, and Jane Austen. Also kittens, puppies, and other fluffy cute things. Someday I'm going to marry Mr. Tilney. The end.