Booklouse Recommendations for March
My fellow insects,
As I write this on St.Valentine’s Day, I am hoping that you are not expecting a review of a book about a passionate love affair. Oh, yes, both these books revolve around love, but love in its more diverse patterns.
The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra
This is another of those fascinating books where the author takes a piece of history, does a lot of research and comes up with an enthralling story of historical fiction. Make sure you read the notes at the end of this book which give the background, including an amazing interview which Sierra had with a monk shortly before he died, to this extraordinary story.
This is a novel based on the well known legend of a young girl dressed in blue who appeared to the native people of South West America in the 1600’s and told them of the coming of the priests who would be spreading the Gospel amongst them, and how they should prepare themselves for baptism. The Lady in Blue who appeared in New Mexico in the 1600’s, had never, during her life time, left either the village in which she was born, nor the monastery that she founded in Spain.
Moving from a young girl in California, to a journalist in Spain, to a monk and several priests in Venice, all in the 1990’s, and back to the legend itself in the 1600’s, Javier Sierra weaves a mystical thread of evidence as to why and how this legend could have possibly been created. The historical characters believe that uncovering the secret behind The Lady in Blue’s bilocations (the ability to be in two places at the same time) will get them closer to their goal, but when one of the priests suddenly dies and a rare manuscript containing the nun’s secrets is stolen, the plot thickens! The conclusion might surprise you.
Javier Sierra is a well known Spanish historian and author who wrote, among other books, The Secret Supper which has been translated into thirty-five languages.
Kenneth Grahame – An Innocent in the Wild Wood
By Alison Prince
In reviewing this book, I have to admit to a bias; my first, and without doubt my favourite children’s book was and still is Wind in the Willows.
This biography by Alison Prince is a remarkably perceptive biography in which she uses previously unpublished materials to uncover the many layers of Kenneth Grahame’s character, ultimately that of Toad of Toad Hall. In writing Wind in the Willows, which is the most famous of his stories, Grahame seems to transfer his very muddled desires into the characters of his novel. He always had this longing to live freely, romping around the English countryside with out a worry in the wonderful world of nature that he so loved. But here we see him as Alison Prince carefully exposes layer upon layer of his character and we can see how his various traits are transformed into the characters of Mole (his son Alistair), Ratty, Toad (himself), Badger and the Weasels who try to take over Toad Hall. It is one of the great ironic twists in the tale of this story that Alistair, his son known as the Mouse, should commit suicide under a train, considering that Grahame had always described trains as the scourge of the countryside.
An incredible love/hate relationship between Grahame and his son Mouse, is exceptionally well portrayed in this biography from the first time that Grahame tells his son a bed time story, through the continuation of those stories all the time that the boy was away from home to the point in time when it is suggested to Grahame that these stories should be published as a book. Adding to the feeling of the unreality of their marriage is the impression that I got that Grahame’s wife, Elspeth Thomson, is simply around because he reluctantly agreed to marry her, against many of his friends recommendations; but, having said that, she is the one who is always there for Alistair and enjoys an intriguing correspondence with him from his boarding school and University. But, as I have mentioned, Alistair was unable to withstand the unreality of his upbringing by these two fantasists.
This is a fine biography well described by the Times Literary Supplement as… “a thoroughly sensible new account of this much-loved, but curiously un-lovable author.”
Happy chewing till next time,
The Booklouse
