Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels are one of my favorite book series at present. As such, I space out reading them to savor the goodness, so this year I ordered a new one for my birthday, which I quickly devoured. Also, I wanted to read something special for the completion of my half cannonball (Huzzah! Hip Hooray!) But enough about me, on to the book! Bradley has created a precocious and endearing detective in Flavia. Much like I consider Phryne Fisher of the Miss […]
It’s a pleasure to sit at this old lady’s knee.
It’s been years since I read the first Call the Midwife book, and I only vaguely remember it. When this finally made its way to the top of my Goodreads list, I was a little concerned that the gap would be a problem. Fortunately, Shadows of the Workhouse more or less functions as a standalone book. Knowing the basic workings of Nonnatus House is useful, but hardly required. Whereas Call the Midwife was a pretty straightforward memoir of Jennifer Worth’s time as a midwife working […]
Wolves at the Door
There are actually 12 books in the Wolves Chronicles, but when I was a kid I only read six of them, and these were the six that I recently reread and am reviewing: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Black Hearts in Battersea, Nightbirds on Nantucket, The Stolen Lake, The Cuckoo Tree, and Dido and Pa. The series takes place in alternate timeline in 1800s England (in this timeline, James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution, and so throughout the books his descendants sit […]
War, what is it good for?
I thoroughly enjoyed this, the third volume of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England, which covers a period of our history that I knew virtually nothing about (I don’t think I can really count Horrible Histories’ Charles II song as ‘knowledge’), from the succession of James I following the death of the childless Elizabeth I through to the flight of James II, taking in the civil war and the unprecedented execution of a king that happened in between. Here’s what I learned… James I of England, […]