christianreader | November Reading List

The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson

Orphan Annika was found in a tiny mountain church by Ellie, who cooks for three eccentric professors in Vienna. Raised with much love by Ellie, the professors, and the housemaid Sigrid, Annika still dreams of the day her real mother will come for her and explain why she abandoned her all those years ago. And then one day it happens just like in Annika's dreams: Edeltraut von Tannenberg sweeps in and carries Annika away to the moldy, crumbling old family castle in northern Germany. "Be careful what you wish for" doesn't even begin to cover what happens next.

I liked Star of Kazan a lot the first time I read it, but the story drags a little on re-reading. I love the descriptions of Ellie's kitchen, though -- who wouldn't love a place where it something yummy is always about to come out of the oven, just in time for a snack?

Death in Zanzibar by M. M. Kaye

Dany Ashton is about to leave for Zanzibar where her mother and stepfather are hosting a house party. On the way to London she stops to pick up a letter from the family lawyer, and sets off a chain of events no one could have predicted -- murder, burglary, stolen identity, and of course, romance!

M.M. Kaye was recommended to me as "Mary Stewart Lite", and it's true -- all the elements of Mary Stewart's novels are here, but M.M. Kaye only scratches the surface where Mary Stewart digs deeper. A fun read, and easy -- I read the whole book in about four hours while I was doing laundry.

Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle by Georgette Heyer

Sylvester, Duke of Salford, decides he needs a wife. There are five or six society beauties who seem to meet his list of requirements, but before he can offer for any of them his godmother conspires to introduce him to her granddaughter Phoebe. A series of unfortunate events leads to Sylvester, Phoebe, and her best friend Tom sheltering in a shabby little inn while Tom recovers from a broken leg, and Sylvester and Phoebe become quite friendly. Too bad for Phoebe she wrote him into her recently-published gothic novel as the villain...and his sister-in-law is only too happy to believe that Phoebe's story was written to show her the way to escape from Sylvester and his "cruelty" to her and her young son.

One of my favorite Heyers so far, and really delightful. From slightly cold and arrogant at the beginning Sylvester becomes a sympathetic character you can't help falling in love with, and Phoebe is adorable, sweet and naive but not irritatingly so.

Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

Lara Lington has a slight problem: she can see and talk to the ghost of her dead great-aunt Sadie. Sadie won't leave her alone until they find her favorite necklace; only if it's buried with her can she rest in peace. Not content with looking for the necklace Sadie bullies and annoys Lara into doing all sorts of out-of character things, like barging into a meeting in a random office to ask a stranger on a date, and dressing up in full flapper costume to go out with him. As Lara unravels the mystery of the necklace she discovers that Sadie wasn't just a senile old lady in a nursing home, and that one of her own relatives was the one who wanted the family to see her that way to cover his guilty conscience.

I wanted to like this but I really didn't. It was boring and weird, and Sadie was irritating as all get out. Lara was a standard Kinsella heroine, from her inability to tell the truth to her inability to pay bills on time to her "sweetness" that is supposed to excuse everything. It worked better in Shopaholic and Undomestic Goddess than it does here.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor

Forget everything you thought you knew about Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll got it all wrong. Alice is actually Princess Alyss Heart, exiled in Victorian England after her evil aunt Redd staged a coup and killed her parents.

That's all the describing I feel like doing, because I really hated this book. The story was fantastic, and in the hands of a different author would have been something good, but Frank Beddor CAN NOT WRITE. He explains what's perfectly obvious and then leaves blanks where explanation would have been helpful. Every character is a cliche from fantasy movies -- the brave young heroine, the mysterious ninja-like protector, the wise but nerdy tutor, the angry young man with a tormented past. It was an interesting idea, but the author should have passed it on to someone who could actually write.

A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper

Told in diary form, ABHOM tells the story of the fictional island of Montmaray off the coast of Spain, and the crumbling castle where live the remaining members of the royal family: crazy King John, his daughter Veronica, his devoted and fanatical servant Rebecca, his nieces Henry, a tomboy who pretty much runs wild on the island, and Sophie, whose diary this is. There are about four villagers, and sometimes Rebecca's son Simon and Sophie's brother whose name I can't now remember come to visit from England. The eccentric little group mostly keep to themselves -- Sophie's biggest problems are her crush on Simon and whether or not she should accept an aunt's invitation to make her debut in London -- until a couple of Nazis show up and things take a rather dramatic twist.

It's being marketed as a new I Capture the Castle (the back of the book even hints that it might be better), but Sophie is no Cassandra Mortmain and the characters never quite come to life. Once the dramatic gothic part takes over it's a little more interesting, but the writing is too shallow to really make you care.

The Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart

Rose Fenemore needs a break from teaching at Cambridge, and a cottage for rent on a tiny Scottish island sounds like just the thing. When not one but two mysterious men show up in her kitchen one night she finds that even tiny Scottish islands can provide intrigue and drama.

One of Mary Stewart's later books, and it shows -- in places the first person narration just doesn't seem convincing for a 27-year-old. Far be it from me to criticize Mary Stewart, though; I'm still in awe of the way she can make such a simple story so exciting.

Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

A true comfort read, this is the first in a collection of Laurie Colwin's essays about food and cooking. She writes in a way that makes you want to curl up on a stormy night with a pot of soup simmering on the stove and this book to read. I first discovered her when I started working as a shelver, and come back to this book and the second, More Home Cooking, whenever I start to feel blue. Some of her recipes are rather vague, but the ones I've tried -- beef stew, pot roast, and gingerbread, all work and turn out wonderfully. I think this year I'm finally going to take her advice and put chocolate frosting on the gingerbread, just to see what she's going on about.

Abduction by Charlotte Lamb

Marisa left her husband two years previously, not realizing she was pregnant. Now Jamie, her son, is her whole life, and when he disappears while they're out shopping the police insist on knowing who his father is. Long flashbacks tell the story of Marisa and Gabriel's courtship and what went wrong in their marriage, interspersed with Marisa's fear and worry as she and Gabriel wait for their son to come home.

Bland and silly, like most Harlequin novels, and Marisa is dumb as a box of rocks -- who leaves their baby in a stroller outside while they go in to shop? I'm glad I didn't give in to the impulse at the book sale to buy all the Charlotte Lamb books I saw, because they aren't living up to my hopes.

Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater

I enjoyed Lament and Shiver, so I had high hopes for this one, but it was a disapointment. The story picks up a few months after Lament left off, after Dee, the main character from Lament, and her best friend James have gone off to Thornking-Ash boarding school for musically talented students.

The problem with Ballad is that for some reason the author chose to tell it from James's perspective, when he has the most boring story in the book. His narration basically goes like this: "I'm awesome! I'm so quirky! I write on my hands a lot and I play the bagpipes and make smart-alecky comments to teachers, what more could you want? I used to be hung up on my best friend Dee but she chose that faerie assassin guy over me so now I mope a lot. There's this faerie muse who wants to take away several years of my life in return for amazing musical genius, and I just don't know what to do. Blah blah blah, quirky quirky awesome, I'm so cool, blah blah blah." Even then it could have been okay except that in between each chapter we get text messages from Dee that she's not sending, and they throw out all these tantalizing hints that something scary and weird is happening on her side of things, but then you turn the page and it's back to James and Nuala and their odd little love story.

Hopefully there'll be a third book to tie things up for Dee, because I was not happy with the way this one went.

Frozen Enchantment by Jessica Steele

When I was 11 I watched the winter Olympics and saw Alexei Urmanov win a gold medal in men's figure skating, and fell in love. I was obsessed with Russia after that and read anything I could get my hands on that was about Russia or set in Russia (it's amazing how smart teachers will assume you are when they see you reading Dostoevsky in 9th grade), and this was one of my favorite books at the time.

Clearly I was on crack, because it did not stand up to being read again as an adult. Cheesy doesn't begin to describe it. Basically it's about Jolene (does that name not scream trailer trash in England?), a secretary who has the problem of being too pretty, so that her sleazeball boss keeps coming on to her. Cheyne Templeton, the president of their company, sees them embracing in the hall and assumes they're having an affair, but Jolene is the only one available at such short notice who speaks Russian, so he takes her with him on his next business trip to Moscow. While there they kiss several times and she falls in love, but thinks he doesn't like her. Back at home he shows up at her house and goes back over the whole story but from his perspective, and reveals that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her but thought she had a thing for married men, so he kept her at arms' length as often as possible.

Yeah. It's great. You should all run out and buy a copy. :-P

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster

Jerusha Abbot, an orphan, is given a chance to go to college by a mysterious benefactor who she calls Daddy-Long-Legs after seeing his shadow in the hall grotesquely stretched out like a spider. One of the requirements for her scholarship is that she write letters to him every month to update him on her progress, and the rest of the book is made up of the letters she writes -- no dry progress updates, but long and entertaining letters about college life and her hopes for the future.

I was completely charmed by this and want to find the sequel as soon as possible. I did peek to see if my guess as to Daddy-Long-Legs's identity was right (it was), but knowing the end didn't ruin it at all. It was just as good as I'd always heard, and how often does that happen?

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

Elspeth Huxley and her parents move to a remote farm in Kenya in the early 1900s to plant coffee, which is just the latest of her father's "get rich quick" schemes.

This was wonderful, though I don't know why a subject which bores me to tears when it takes place in my own country should be so fascinating to me just because it happened on the other side of the world. Elspeth Huxley was only about 8 or 9 when this took place, so it's amazing how well she remembered things. Of course quite a lot of details must have been made up (unless her mother kept very detailed diaries), but it feels very real and plausible.