I read children's books, fantasy books, scifi books, horror books, westerns, mysteries, and regency romances
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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.
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.
The book: I am reading the Terri Windling anthology The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors. The stories, essays, and poems in this collection are some of the most haunting I have ever read. I can’t read this anthology straight through - it hurts to read too much at once.
I just finished Terri Windling’s essay “Afterword: Surviving Childhood.” I admire her so much, as a person as well as for her work with fairy tales and mythic literature. In this essay, she writes about being sexually abused as a child and reflects on why some abused children escape their backgrounds and others don’t. In her case, it was reading books of fairy tales that provided her the tools she needed to survive.
I do know that fairy tales set me on my road, and gave me companions, and provided a map. They told me the only way to reach the lands of Happily Ever After was to gather my wits about me and set off through the Unknown Woods.
After reading the essay, I couldn’t help but compare her to Jilly Coppercorn from Charles de Lint’s Newford series. They share a similarly abused childhood and both are artists, lovers of fairies, and bright shining lights of inspiration.
Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality - for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and the heart and the courage to use it wisely.
The tea: Moroccan mint green tea from Stash, one of my all-time favorites. I love any tea with mint in it, but with this tea the aroma of mint is so dainty.
Do they go together? A delicate tea, and a powerful woman. Terri Windling has a lovely blog filled with musings and photographs of her West County home that all mythically inclined folk should explore.
