The Amateur Cracksman

It occurs to me that I have never written about Raffles. Lots of people have heard of Raffles, I think, but not many people have read any of the stories. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either, except for an attempt to listen to the audiobook of The Amateur Cracksman (no matter how hard I try, I will never have enough patience for audiobooks).

Anyway, Raffles. He’s an excellent cricket player! He has dark, curly hair! He leads his old friend Bunny into a life of crime!

Books I have neglected to post about since finishing The Girl From Hollywood

I keep wanting to do a post about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Girl from Hollywood, and how an absolutely appalling series of coincidences gets three different women involved with an evil movie director named, if I recall correctly, Wilson Crumb. One gets addicted to cocaine and becomes a drug dealer (although he cannot get her to sleep with him);another gets addicted to cocaine, becomes his mistress, and dies of pnuemonia after he hits her; and one, after semi-successfully fending off his advances, shoots herself. The two drug-addicted ones are in love with the same young man, who lives on a ranch modeled after Burroughs’ own, and the attempted suicide is his sister. His name is Custer, and he spends a while in jail for murder. It’s all pretty miserable. If I had no interest in reading the Tarzan books before, I really don’t now.

Anyway: things I have read since The Girl From Hollywood, and liked better:

Graustark

I’ve been very busy lately, but I always make time to read. What I can’t always make time for is the writing part. So, in an effort to catch up, here are my brief thoughts on Graustark:

Graustark is about a rich American named Grenfall Lorry — and his name is pretty much the coolest thing about him — who falls in love with a mysterious foreign girl traveling through America with her aunt and uncle. He follows her home to Europe, only to find that she is actually Princess Yetive, ruler of the tiny principality of Graustark.

Hildegarde’s Harvest

I tried not to rush straight through Hildegarde’s Harvest, but I couldn’t help it. I thought I loved this series the first time I read it, but now that I’ve read it again, it’s become one of my favorite girls’ series, perhaps second only to Patty Fairfield.

Hildegarde’s Harvest is sort of split into two. In the first half, Hildegarde goes to New York for three days to stay with her Great-Aunt Emily and to sell some cakes she has made (little tulip-shaped almond ones, with a peach cream filling) so that she has enough money to buy Christmas presents. While in the city, she manages to run into Colonel Ferrers and Hugh who have been visiting friends, a number of girls who could be characters in an 1890s Gossip Girl, and all the main characters from Queen Hildegarde.

After her return home, the Merryweathers arrive for Christmas, Jack Ferrers returns from Germany, and Hildegarde pines a little for Roger Merryweather. Things wrap up without to much fanfare, and I’m left feeling a little sad that the series is over.

However, the really important thing about Hildegarde’s Harvest is that it opens with Hildegarde imagining a tea party she would like to give, to which she would invite Robin Hood, William of Orange, and Alan Breck Stuart, among others. She would have David Balfour as well, because she thinks he’d get along with Roger, but not any of King Arthur’s knights, because none of them has a sense of humor.

I love this girl.

Hildegarde’s Neighbors

Somehow I never remember how awesome the Hildegarde books are when I’m not reading them, which is why it took me such a long time to get around to rereading Hildegarde’s Neighbors. I don’t think I love it as much as Hildegarde’s Home, but it does introduce the Merryweathers, who are lots of fun. Bell, the eldest, becomes Hildegarde’s best friend, although she is also very fond of Gertrude (Peggy’s Snowy Owl) and twins Gerald and Philip, who call each other Obadiah and Ferguson.

There isn’t a lot going on plotwise, but the book is none the worse for that. Hilda discovers a secret room off her bedroom, turns eighteen, goes camping with the Merryweathers, and sort of falls in love with Mr. Merryweather’s half-brother Roger, who is in his mid-twenties.

It’s very cute, because she really looks up to him, and he, while a paragon in most respects, is kind of shy and doesn’t think she likes him. Still, I don’t really want to see Hilda in love; she makes such a perfect teenager. Which is not to say that teenagers can’t fall in love, but that when they do, in books of this sort, they tend to get very serious and grow up all at once. Hilda still has almost a whole book to go before she really grows up, though.

When I say Hilda makes a perfect teenager, I really mean it. She’s still sort of a kid, and plays games with younger children, but she’s also apt to remember that she’s supposed to be a dignified young woman in the middle of playing Indians with Jerry and Phil. And she tries to take on new responsibilities, and take care of the younger children in the book, and altogether it’s far more convincing than anything you’ll find in Louisa May Alcott.

Laura E. Richards seems to me to have a very good understanding of how young people act, even if the characters in her books are a bit on the unnaturally good side. And then — I know I say this about almost every children’s book I like, but it’s a really great indicator of quality — when Richard’s characters laugh and joke and play games, you genuinely believe that they’re enjoying themselves, and you laugh along with them. I mean, what more could you ask for?

Hildegarde’s Home/My new Kindle

The internet is a very distracting thing, and it often gets in the way of my reading, especially since so many of the books I read are only available to me via the internet.

But as of Tuesday, I am the proud possessor of an Amazon Kindle and can read e-texts without distractions. I have had time to read Vicky Van, Hildegarde’s Home — although pdfs are not ideal Kindle material — a somewhat disturbing book of Agatha Christie stories, a book of Father Brown stories, a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton, Danny the Champion of the World, a Christmas story by Connie Willis, and about a third of a mystery novel from the 1880s called The Diamond Coterie. So, yeah, I’m enjoying myself.

But right now I’m here to talk about Hildegarde’s Home, which may be my favorite of the Hildegarde books. She seems more like a genuine girl in this one — she’s hard-working, knowledgeable, and full of enthusiasm, but there’s no sense that she’s infallible, which is a danger in books of this sort, and however good and smart Hildegarde Grahame is, her mother is better and smarter. Also, everyone — the author, Mrs. Grahame, and Hildegarde herself — has a sense of humor.

Peggy

Peggy’s book, which is just called Peggy, is the best in the series so far, and not just because I’m a sucker for a good school story. Peggy was the kind and strong but sort of stupid one in Three Margarets, but she really comes into her own here, in her first year at boarding school.

Margaret Montfort

The three books following Three Margarets deal separately with the Montfort girls. First comes Margaret, whose story is told in Margaret Montfort. While Rita had a father and a stepmother and both Peggy’s parents were living, Margaret was orphaned shortly before the start of Three Margarets by the death of her father. Since she’s also the kind, capable, well-educated and well-behaved one, Uncle John Montfort invited her to stay with him at Fernley House.

Three Margarets

I’m hampered in writing about Laura E. Richards’ Three Margarets by the fact that I never posted here about her Hildegarde series, to which the Margaret series is sometimes considered a sequel. It would also have been useful to refer to Aunt Jane’s Nieces (written by L. Frank Baum under the name Edith Van Dyne), but I never wrote about that either.

Three Margarets, actually, can be described almost entirely in terms of Aunt Jane’s Nieces:

The Little Colonel Series: the first four books

So, it’s been a while, huh? But I plan on updating more often now.

It’s hard to know where to start, because I’ve read kind of a lot of stuff since I last updated regularly. Why don’t we start with The Little Colonel series, and how I never knew that it existed, or that it’s really awesome?

I think “The Little Colonel” probably means “Shirley Temple” to most people, but I haven’t seen the movie in years, and all I really remember is the bit with Bojangles dancing on the stairs, so I came to the books with few expectations.

The Little Colonel is sort of the basic children’s story, a shorter, girls’ version of Little Lord Fauntleroy minus some sophistication and plus a basis in fact. Apparently Annie Fellows Johnston actually knew a girl — Hattie Cochran — who, like Lloyd Sherman, shared the mannerisms of her one-armed Confederate veteran grandfather. You can read more about it at the Little Colonel website, but I wouldn’t. Knowing that most of the characters are thinly disguised portraits of people who later married the wrong people or committed suicide is kind of upsetting.