stone soup books

Thursday Tea: The Castle on the Hill, Elizabeth Goudge

The book: The Castle on the Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge.  It is wartime in Britain, and Miss Brown’s boarding house and childhood home by the sea has just been destroyed by Hitler’s bombs.  Miss Brown is sitting in the middle of London, wondering what in the world she is going to do and overcome with the fear that she is no longer part of world, a “piece of the puzzle.” Suddenly she hears the passionate music of a street violinist and is suddenly filled with peace and understanding.

Like many of Goudge’s books, the novel opens with a emotional revelation of one character, and gradually moves outward -like ripples on a pond- to affect the lives of all those who come into contact with that one character.  Miss Brown approaches the musician and gives him all she has, a shilling, and tells him what his music made her feel.  The musician is astonished – he set off that morning intending to earn a shilling to end his life.  Somehow Miss Brown and Jo Issacson both end up on a train headed to the West Country, toward an ancient castle where the last members of a old family are still living – Charles Birley, a chronicler of history, his nephews Richard and Stephen, and a pair of London refugees, Moppet and Poppet, who appear at the castle door.

I have completely fallen in love with the writing of Elizabeth Goudge.  Hopelessly, helplessly.  Her books are quiet ones, filled with emotional insights and personal revelations and seagulls that bring private joy to the characters that witness them.  The Castle on the Hill is also about World War II, the children’s flight from London, and its ravages on the citizens.  The mental struggles of Stephen, a pacifist fighting to hash out his feelings toward the war and enlistment, reminded me strongly of Walter Blythe in Rilla of Ingleside, for whose struggle and eventual fate I always felt so badly about.

The tea: Darljeeling tea by Twinnings of London, a black tea grown in the Himalayans.

Do they go together? Tea is the glue that holds the spirit of Miss Brown together, and I felt very Miss Brownish as I drank my cup of tea today.  Goudge points out that it is the ritual of making tea, pouring it, drinking it slowly that is so comforting, and this is true. 

Thursday Tea is a weekly meme organized by Anastasia of Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog.

Oh, guys.  Oh, you guys. I just had a birthday and it was the hardest birthday ever.  I feel as though I am gettingso gosh-darn OLD.  I am just three years away from staring at a high school reunion invitation in the mail! Where has the time gone?  What have I done with myself?  Where are my esoteric graduate degrees and my publishing contracts?

I swear, I do not normally panic over birthdays, but this one kicked me hard in the head and then pushed me down a flight of stairs and stood above me slapping its knees and laughing hysterically.  So in a fit of birthday-related angst I decided to fulfill a dream and become a mermaid.  I’m making a mermaid tail!  and I’m going to swim in it!

I announced this plan to my family and, in the words of Sallie McBride, all was joy and excitement and hysterics. Except not really.  My family doesn’t quite understand these freaks of mine.  But for two weeks now I’ve been floating around in hazy daydreams picturing being a mermaid in a pool, at a lake, at the beach.  At the beach on sun-warmed rocks!  Romantically swimming in a mountain creek-fed spring under a cascading waterfall!  Isn’t that every girl’s dream?  I know personally that I have been dreaming about swimming under a waterfall ever since my silly childhood eyes witnessed a certain scene from the immortal Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. 

Right now I am reading The Grey Horse by R.A. MacAvoy, which has the dubious honor of being the single oldest book on my TBR read shelf.  I picked it up in middle school, and then, assuming it was a romance novel, promptly ignored it for over ten years.  I almost got rid of it when I was culling my library on Paperback Swap, but somehow it remained.  But silly me, it is really a very very good fantasy novel, with phoukas and horses and wonderful stuff like that.  My TBR shelf is full of undiscovered gems, I have found out.

I read The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale and I liked it but didn’t love it.  I read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale and I liked it but didn’t love it.  They completely failed to blow me away.  What on earth is the matter with me?  I have heard many bloggers say that they adore Shannon Hale, but I just haven’t found Shannon Hale to be adorable.  “The Goose Girl” is one of my favorite Grimm tales and I was so excited that someone had finally made a novel out of it.  Then I read it and all I could think was “Eh.”  The Princess Academy was better.  I really did love the descriptions of the mountains and the quarry-speech, but Miri seemed so bland.  And I wanted more from the boarding-school scenes!  Maybe it is just nostalgia and childhood memories, but I seem to remember Ella Enchanted to be a similar but much better book.

I read Bright Young Things by Anna Godberson.  I sneaked a peek at the last chapter because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read a tragic, Gatsbyesque story about socialites in the Roaring Twenties.  I wanted to read a thrilling and exciting story about flappers and cigarette girls making it big and speakeasies and cabaret singers!  And somehow I got the impression, from reading a bit in the last chapter, that this book was going to be the latter instead of the former.  But the book was turned out to be tragic after all, darn it, but at least the character that I feared was cardboard-ishly evil turned out to be sympathetic.

I read The Road to Yesterday by L.M. Montgomery.  I knew it would be short stories but I didn’t realize they were Glen St. Mary short stories!  I love Anne books set in Avonlea best, but I have a special fondness for Rainbow Valley, because of the Meredith brood.  In this edition of The Road to Yesterday the name of John Meredith’s wife was called “Rosamund!”  Which we all know is a typo because her name is Rosemary.  It always pleases me that in her short stories Maud’s characters have decidedly different opinions about Anne.  Some think she is the most stylish, beautiful, understanding, practically-perfect-in-every-way woman in the Glen.  And then others think she’s smug and conceited!  I do love Anne but she is no paragon and I am glad that she is not quite universally beloved in her community.

Meanwhile I’m getting ready to reread Fire and Hemlock for Kristen M.’s read-along at We Be Reading!  I took notes the last time I read it; I must find them.  There ought to be a Diana discussion every month to look forward to.  Lots of bloggers are reading Dark Lord of Derkholm and it makes me want to read it again, too.  Look, some wonderful person has even sketched drawings of the griffins, isn’t that wonderful?

Thursday Tea: The Owl Service

The book: I kept seeing The Owl Service being mentioned various places and in other books, though which books they were I cannot for the life of me recall, and so I finally got my act together and requested a copy via interlibrary loan.

The Owl Service is a retelling of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, a woman created from flowers.  The book, according to Alan Garner, is an “expression of the myth,” meaning, apparently, that it is a contemporary retelling.  I quite like that term, expression of the myth.  In the Mabinogion, Blodeuwedd was created by the magicians Math and Gwydion to be the wife of Lleu Law Gyffes, but Blodeuwedd instead fell in love with Gronw and plotted to kill Lleu Law.

Alison and Roger are teenaged step-siblings; Alison has inherited a house in Wales where the newly-minted family is spending the summer, and Gwyn is the son of their housekeeper.  They discover a set of dishes  in the attic of the house that bear a pattern of flowers in the shape of an owl, and Alison begins to craft paper owls based on the pattern.  It becomes evident that the tale is going to play itself out again through Alison and Roger and Gwyn.

I’m about halfway through and it is evident that this book has Something To Say about class issues.  Roger thinks Alison’s upper-crust but impoverished mother is a golddigger, Alison thinks Roger’s father is sweet but crass, and Roger thinks Gwyn is pretty much the bottom of the barrel while Alison staunchly defends him and encourages him to stay in school and continue his efforts to improve himself.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The tea: Darljeeling by Twinnings again, must use it up before I can buy something new. 

Do they go together? Tea certainly goes with a story about a owl-patterned service set!

Thursday Tea is a weekly meme organized by Anastasia of Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog.

Fire and Hemlock Read-along: Musings about “Tam Lin” and the teind to hell

Kristen M. of We Be Reading is hosting a Fire and Hemlock read-along! This will be a reread for me, since I first read Fire and Hemlock the summer before my freshman year of college.  I had just finished Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and was busily zipping through every “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer” retelling I could lay my hands on.  I did not love Fire and Hemlock the first time I read it – but according to Jenny’s Law anything Diana Wynne Jones writes is better on a reread anyway, and this is so, so true.

To prepare for the read-along I went and looked over my notes.  Yes, the last time I read Fire and Hemlock I took notes.  Because in both Pamela Dean’s and Diana Wynne Jones’s versions of “Tam Lin” there are so many references, with so much going on in that particularly Jonesian chaos, that I felt the need to write  down and explore some of the themes behind the ballad.

What fascinates me endlessly about the ballad “Tam Lin” is the idea of the teind the fairies pay to hell. Because what is more fascinating than human sacrifice?  There’s something so gory and primitive and can’t-take-your-eyes-off-the-train-wreck about human sacrifice!  I remember reading American Gods for the first time and the part that stuck in my mind was the bit about Hinzelmann and his lake of drowned victims, and the monologue about “How do you make a god?”  I am particularly fascinated by the stories of foundation sacrifice, but that is a story for another time.

I read Katharine Briggs’s Fairies in Tradition and Literature to learn about the origins of fairies. Because the question of “What are fairies, anyway?” is a pretty important one, if you’re trying to figure out why exactly fairies are paying a sacrifice to hell.

So what are fairies anyway?  Briggs has several theories: That the fairies are ancient gods diminished over time, or memories of an ancient race of people, or the dead (unbaptized children, those in purgatory, ghosts), or fallen angels (
those who were too bad for heaven and too good for hell, or trapped between heaven and hell, or devils masquerading as fairies).

So what does the teind represent? It is a payment to hell because fairyland is a subset of hell, if you go with the fallen angel theory.  It represents human sacrifice, which may have been practiced by an ancient cults, or warring tribes of ancient races that might have captured and killed hostages.

I read The Golden Bough, Frazer’s work concerning ancient religion, human sacrifice, and the dying god.  Wikipedia says, and I quote, that the thesis of  The  Golden Bough is that “old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king.”  Basically the idea is that ancient religions, like the Eleusinian mysteries or the priest-king of Nemi, had a deity who represented the spirit of vegetation, who died at harvest time and was reborn at spring.

There are several similarities between the teind in “Tam Lin” and Frazer’s sacred king theory.  First, young men are the preferred victims here.  Both
rituals fall in the autumn: one at Harvest Home (Frazer) and one on Hallowe’en (“Tam Lin.”)   The full moon after the harvest moon is supposedly the traditional time for slaughtering animals before winter, sometimes called the “blood moon, which may be why Hallowe’en is the chosen date of sacrifice in “Tam Lin.”  The teind is from the Queen of Elfland to hell, which represents the underworld, while the sacred king sacrifice is from ancient cults to a fertility goddess, usually chthonic, like Persephone in the Eleusinian mysteries.

So you have Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.  In this retelling of “Tam Lin,” it would seem that the fairies are of the ancient-Greek-gods-diminished-over-time variety – Medeous has an uncanny knowledge of ancient Greek, everyone in her court is a classics major, ect., though her court also has tendencies of the Scottish Unseelie court.

Medeous pays a teind to hell every seven years – perhaps a reenactment of sorts of the ancient Greek mysteries. Medeous’s idea of fun, I suppose.  The name Medeous sounds similar to Medea, who was an enchantress and a priestess of the goddess Hecate; Medea did lots of killing for the men she married.  (That sounds sounds like Medeous.  Hecate, among other things, assisted women in childbirth and the raising of young men, was associated with dogs and horses, and was considered to have mastery over the dead.)

Then you have Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, which of course also has elements of “Thomas the Rhymer.”  Morton Leroy seems to portray the sacred king: he must extend his reign and life by sacrificing another man in his place.  If he does not find a suitable replacement, he will sacrificed instead.  The duel between Tom and Morton towards the end is similar to Frazer’s pet image, the sacred grove at Nemi where the priest-king rules until until he is killed by another man. Even Leroy’s name is suggestive: “Morton” as in “mortal,” and “Leroy” as in “the king.”

The fact that Laurel is named thus also suggests Greek mythology: Daphne changed into a laurel tree after being pursued by Apollo, laurel wreaths crowned victors; in Christian tradition, laurel represented resurrection (and Laurel dies and comes back to life every eighty or so years).  Her last name “Perry” suggests the Persian word “peri,” meaning “fairy.”  Thomas Lynn is of course a corruption “Tam Lin,” and Polly’s name, as mentioned by the girl Jones herself in her essay about Fire and Hemlock, comes from “poly” or many heroes.

So, teinds and human sacrifice!  It’s all fun and games until someone gets ritually murdered.  Thomas Tryon’s novel Harvest Home is also a good read if you’re interested in the sacred king human sacrifice business, and of course the film The Wicker Man and the novel it was based on, Ritual by David Pinner, were heavily influenced by The Golden Bough and The White Goddess by Robert Graves.  There was also a fascinating episode of Supernatural that focused on terrifying scarecrows and harvest sacrifices that I particularly enjoy.

Unexpected Magic, Diana Wynne Jones

I have had this collection of short stories by Diana Wynne Jones for I-don’t-know-how-long.  I don’t know where it came from or when it appeared on my bookshelf!  But I picked it up for Diana Wynne Jones March hosted by Kristen of We Be Reading.

The very first story in this collection is the essay “The Girl Jones” in which Diana Wynne Jones writes about a childhood misadventure involving thirty naked children under her care paddling around in a muddy river.

“Neither of my sisters was ever called the girl Jones.  They were never notorious.”

I believe I am going to refer to Diana Wynne Jones as The Girl Jones from now on.

Having read The Time of the Ghost and Diana Wynne Jones’s autobiography it is impossible to keep from seeing how much her sister Isobel is like Imogen and how Ursula is like Fenella.  I always wish she had written a full-length biography, because her life is fascinating and she writes about it so wittily.  I mean, she lived through World War II!  She lived on what amounts to a commune! She took lectures with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis!

I obtained a high level of amusement from “Nad and Dan adn Quaffy,” a humorous look at science fiction writer F.C. Stone, who buys a word processor and begins to write a new kind of novel.

“For years she had written what seemed to her the most stirring sorts of novels, about lonely aliens among humans, or lonely humans among aliens, or sometimes both kinds lonely in an unkind world, all without ever quite hitting the response from readers she felt she was worth.”

The girl Jones is an excellent satirist and she gives science fiction writers the same treatment she gave high fantasy in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (which I need to reread!).  F.C. Stone spends hours hammering out her stories, drowning herself in coffee and coming up with new types of drinks for her aliens to imbibe:  gav, chvi, xfy.    She believes she is under the influence of chvi when her word processor sudden appears to have turned into a starship and takes control over her book.  Really this story says a lot about the girl Jones and her love of writing:

“My whole career, my entire success as a writer, has been founded on the fact that I enjoy, more than anything else, sitting in front of this screen and pretending it’s the controls of a starship.  I enjoy the dazed feeling, I like the exhaustion, I don’t mind getting cramp, and I even like drinking myself sick on ogvai!”

But my favorite story here was “Carruthers.”  Elizabeth acquires a walking stick on a visit at her grandmother’s house when she is a small girl, and through an overheard conversation, is left with the impression that the stick is called Carruthers, and is to be used for beating her father.  Elizabeth discovers that Carruthers eats, moves, and talks.  Carruthers enjoys her ballet class and insists on attending all lessons with Elizabeth, though she herself detests ballet.  Elizabeth frequently wonders disgruntledly when Carruthers will fulfill its purpose and give her father the beating she feels he deserves for making her take ballet in the first place, and so clearly favoring his nephew over his daughters.

What is is particularly wonderful about this story is that it is classic Girl Jones.  She takes the gloriously magical-realism minds of children, where the line between what is real and what isn’t is so often blurred and pours it out on the page.  I mean, you kind of smile and wink and start reading the story as if it were about a kid and her imaginary friend, this walking stick.  But the walking stick isn’t just a walking stick!  Carruthers is really some kind of an alien-fairy thing, with wings, who helps Elizabeth outwit home invaders!   How fantastic is it when your imagination runs away with you and turns out to be real!

I have to say, as a rule the girl Jones is far and away a better novelist than a short story writer.  Some of the stories in Unexpected Magic don’t even sound like they were written by her.  Some of them are for an adult audience, like “The Master,” and some like “Enna Hittims” and “Little Dot” ought to be in a middle grades anthology.  Some of the stories suffer from complex-Jones-mass-confusion syndrome, which tends to affect her novel endings and is a Good Thing, but not so good in shorter stories.  The Jonesian chaos seems to get a bit diluted in her longer works.  But there are most definitely some excellent stories in this collection begging to be enjoyed!

I am in a vicious, vicious mood today.  I am snarly and growlsome and filled with rage.  It is the epitome of the sneaky hate spiral.  I am reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  This has nothing to do with my mood.  It has rather more to do with the patrons that enrage me by their constant staring while I check out their books.  Their eyes burn holes in my head.  Look, people, there is nothing interesting about the way I use the scanner.  Turn your eyes away.  Stare at the ceiling.  I don’t care.  Just stop staring at me.  And I also hate the patrons full of their false cheerfulness and good mornings!  Their cheerfulness cannot be real, because outside is full of rain and gloom and utter DESPAIR.

I am liking Jonathan Strange very much, just as I thought I would.  I have just gotten the chapter entitled “The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair,” which is such a wonderful title I don’t know why it isn’t its own book.  I find myself harboring some slight tender feelings towards Mr Norrell, he is so prim and out-of-touch and so mysteriously able to make the most exciting things sound impossibly boring.

I am also reading The Solitary Summer, which continuously makes me angry.  Elizabeth is so very smugly enjoying her solitude and her garden and summertime and I am not enjoying any of these things at the moment.  Sometimes I can’t quite stand how Elizabeth gets to play shamelessly in her garden and potter around with her babies all the livelong day and do exactly as she pleases while I am stuck at the library checking out books to patrons with laser eyes.

I read Owl in Love a short while ago.  Patrice Kindl wrote it and I have strong memories of reading The Woman in the Wall in middle school and being utterly fascinated.  I loved Owl herself, her voice and the decrepit mansion she lives in and her dietary habits, but to be honest, I was bored.  It is a very slim book so I shouldn’t have had to skim so much of it, but I did.

I read Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and found them v. amusing, though I liked the second book best (possibly).  Reading the Bridgetshas caused me, as so often happens when I have a mild sort of orgy reading British literature, to feel like I’m writing with a English accent.

I went to the Main Library yesterday and came back giddy with excitement and a stack of delicious books to read: some Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Dodie Smith.  I have never read Rumer Godden, but An Episode of Sparrows was right there next to Elizabeth Goudge and I have heard such good things about it.  Such wonderful titles!  The Jasmine Farm, Green Dolphin Country, Gentian Hill, The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath, The White Witch.  I want all these books in my personal library.

I will never be able to catch up on all the books I want to read, never.  There, writing about all those lovely books has made me feel slightly better.

A writers’ group for the mythically inclined

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Books I’d Quickly Save If My House Was Going To Be Abducted By Aliens

(or any other natural disaster…you get the drift. )

1.  My worn-out copy of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.  My copy has a bent and pealing spine, water stains, and dogears.  It has traveled with me throughout my adult life and I can’t see myself fleeing my burning house without it.  It was out of print for a long time, and now you can buy brand-new copies off Amazon, but I love the gorgeous Thomas Canty cover on my copy.

2.  My library-bound copy of Richard Peck’s Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death.  I worked too darn hard to get my own copy of this book and I don’t want to ever work that hard to find a book again.  After scavenging used bookstores and Friends of the Library sales, I finally scored a copy from PaperBackSwap two years after I started my account.

3.  The Complete Shakespeare given to me by husband as a birthday gift.  It is beautiful, bound in lovely red cloth, and very sentimental.

4.  My first edition copy of Jean Webster’s Dear Enemy.  I paid $25 for my copy and it is, believe me, more than I’ve ever paid for a used book in my life.  Also it is the most recent book purchase I have made.

5.  My lovely illustrated copy of Anne of the Island.  This is the edition that I read for the first time, and the gorgeous drawings are forever entwined with my memories.  There is one particular drawing of Anne and Gilbert by the apple tree that I would love to frame and hang up on a wall.

6.  Jim Jump, which was, according to my mother, my my most favorite book when I was a baby.  What I believe is in fact the case is that Jim Jump was my mother’s favorite baby book.  Sadly, in the process of raising four daughters Jim Jump was lost forever and my mother laments over it to this day.  A few years ago, I found a copy and snatched that sucker up!  I’ve got a secret plan – when I have children of my own, I’m going to give my mother this copy of Jim Jump as a pregnancy announcement.

7.  My omnibus edition of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.  This copy was given to me by my best friend in high school – we both adored these books.  We’d doodle donkeys with wings on our binders and point at people we didn’t like and say “Argelfraster!”  What I would really love is the hardcover editions illustrated by Trina Schart-Hyman, I look for them at every used book sale I visit.

8.  Mary Engelbreit’s The Snow Queen.  My grandmother had few children’s books in her house, but she did have this one.  I loved this book to pieces.  My grandmother still has the copy I loved so much at her house, but recently I acquired my own copy (thanks PaperBackSwap!) and I’m saving it for when we have children.

9.  My hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The rest of my Harry Potter collection are paperbacks, but when Deathly Hallows came out I went to a midnight release party with a good friend to buy my own copy.  The first and only time I have done such a thing!  We stood in line for an hour, got our copies, and the first thing I did was flip open to the last page and read the final sentence. 

10.  My entire collection of Saddle Club books.  I have some serious doubts about my ability to swiftly pack up all 100+ of my Saddle Club books before my house is beamed away.  But I have never been able to let go of them, despite the fact that I know some young girls who would have loved to be given these books.  I spend every cent of allowance I received for years on these books.

The Rosemary Tree, Elizabeth Goudge

I read The Rosemary Tree this past weekend.  I read parts of it in my newly-painted sunshiney yellow kitchen eating chocolate-covered strawberries, and I read parts of it in my cozy reading chair with tortoiseshell cats curled up on my toes.  That is because this is the sort of book that goes exceptionally well with cozy nooks and sunshine and strawberries.

Elizabeth Goudge is my new favorite author for comfortable books.  I read The Little White Horse a few months ago and loved it.  A few weeks ago, I decided to order another of her books through interlibrary loan and I picked this one because of its title.  The Rosemary Tree sounded like it would have enchantment and delightful characters and many descriptions of gardens and rivers.  And it does!

The Rosemary Tree begins with bed-ridden Harriet, who suffers from crippling arthritis, watching the gulls from the window.  The narrative flows from Harriet to the rest of the household, to John Wentworth, a parson who suffers from acute self-doubt and forgetfulness, to Daphne, his proud wife, to his daughter Winkle, who escapes from the boredom of the schoolroom into a personal, magical country, to Margery, who suffers from the sharp remarks of her teacher Miss Giles.

I love Elizabeth Goudge because she writes about longing.  It is hard to put into words why this appeals to me so much, except this particular brand of longing is something I have been feeling myself for as long as I can remember, the type of longing that Master Nathaniel in Lud-in-the-Mist feels when he hears “The Note.”  Harriet knows it by the way she feels when she sees the gulls.  Daphne knows it when hearing the song of a linnet.

And Elizabeth Goudge knows about secret countries, too.  Winkle escapes to her imaginary country in the broom closet, where she is the same size as a plum blossom, and she knows that she will someday forget how to reach her secret country, and she will only be able to remember her longing for it.  And there’s Margery’s private world under the willow tree, Miss Giles noticing the English spring for the first time in twenty years, Michael Stone’s vision of knighthood.  This is the stuff that really gives some heart to Elizabeth Goudge’s writing, the same kind of heart that I’ve always found in the writing of L.M. Montgomery.  It is, I suppose, the idea that being amidst nature can soothe the soul, or fulfill some sort of spiritual longing.  I’m not much for theology or religion, but I’ve always responded to this sort of religious naturalism in books.

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle Read-Along, hosted by Iris on Books

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink…”

Blerg.  I am kinda late on posting this.  But sometimes I find it hard to write about books that I absolutely love.  And this is a book that I love, love, love.  Sometimes I think this is the book I love most in the world.  It’s definitely up there at the top of my list.  I could just hug this book, it’s so good.  It’s better than sleep and tea and cookies and tinsel, is how good it is.

I first read I Capture the Castle last year, right after Christmas, after all the presents had been opened and all the family had visited and all the excitement had been had.  I couldn’t stop smiling, the whole time I read this book.  I found myself floating away and dropping gently on the grassy mound upon which Belmotte Tower stands, looking down at a castle slowly falling to pieces, where two girls wait for something to happen.

“There used to be two of us always on the look-out for life, wondering, hoping; two Brontë-Jane Austen girls, poor but spirited, two Girls of Godsend Castle.”

Cassandra, a seventeen-year-old girl and aspiring writer,  starts a journal to teach herself how to write.  She intends to “capture” her family and their life at the castle:  the beautiful, ruthless Rose, so discontented with the family’s poverty that she declares,  “I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.”  There’s Thomas, their younger brother, and Stephen the farmhand, who resembles a Greek god and is devoted to Cassandra.  There’s James Mortmain, their father and a once-famous writer, who once went after their mother with a cake knife in a fit of rage and spent three months in prison and who now suffers from writer’s block.  And Topaz, their stepmother and a former artist’s model, who regularly goes outside at night to commune with nature.

The family lives in sort of a dream, cut off from the rest of the world.  Godsend Castle is located in a small village, and the Mortmains’ only visitors are the Vicar and Miss Marcy, the schoolmistress and librarian, who arranges for them to have the latest detective novels.  Then one evening two Americans brothers show up, the new owners of nearby Scoatney Hall as well as the castle.  Rose instantly sets her cap for Simon, the elder brother.

This book is an English major’s dream.  So many allusions – James Mortmain’s novel is called Jacob Wrestling, and Cassandra and Rose have conversations about which kind of book they’d prefer to live in: “Which would be nicest – Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”  I love all the characters, but secretly my favorite is always Topaz.  Cassandra captures her as “two thirds practical kindness and one third spoof.”  Topaz goes outside in a rainstorm clad in only wellies and a raincoat, has a “mania for green,” wears handmade clothing and plays the lute.  The Real Topaz, says Cassandra, is the one who washes clothes and scrounges up enough food for tea, but the other part of Topaz (and the part that I adore) is her poser artiness. The way she dismisses a new play by saying that is not “significant;” making remarks about Tolstoy; proclaiming the beauty of a sunset in thrilling tones that cause her husband to say, “My dear, you’re an ass.”  Rose wonders if Topaz does it to fool others.  Cassandra suspects that Topaz does it for her own personal enjoyment.  This is a sentiment I appreciate.  Even if a person is not really an artistic genius, there’s no reason not to pretend to be.

And there are just so many wonderful things that happen in this book.  For instance, I love Cassandra’s Midsummer Eve rites.  There is nothing I’d like more than to spend a day making flower garlands and dancing around a bonfire.  And of course there’s the part where she and Neil take a moonlight swim in the moat, and the hilarious adventure Rose has as a bear.  In short, this book is just utterly charming and very very funny and altogether magical.