About Peggy Saville and More About Peggy

So, this is what happens when I ask for recommendations: I download everything that looks appealing, read maybe half of it, and leave the rest sitting on my kindle indefinitely. Except that I also sometime come back to things. I’ve had Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey’s Peggy Saville books on my kindle since James recommended them more than a year ago. I finally got around to reading them last weekend, and I really enjoyed them. I mean, I thought there were some structural issues, and also when I look back at the two books it seems like nothing ever actually happened, but it was entertaining nothing.

The Dragon’s Secret

The Dragon’s Secret is the least good of the Augusta Huiell Seaman books I’ve read, which is a shame, because it started really well. The setting — a seaside resort in the autumn, an empty bungalow — was very much in its favor, and so was the setup — a girl keeping her invalid aunt company meets up with another girl who is there on a fishing trip with her father and brother, and they find an mysterious, ornate, and unopenable (a real word, believe it or not) box buried in the sand — but there’s no follow-through. The two girls do a little sneaking around, but they don’t really figure out anything on their own, and it turns out they’ve just stumbled into someone else’s mystery, which eventually gets explained to them. And because they really don’t know anything about what’s going on until they’re told, there’s not much life to the story. Still, there was something fun and atmospheric about it, so it’s not a total loss.

The Three Sides of Paradise Green

First, here’s where we are with the poll results:

• 10 votes — Top 10 underappreciated children’s books. I am working on this. It’s going to take a little while, but I do have my list of ten books finalized.
• 5 votes — Pollyanna. This is going to be part of that list. I figure when you stack up all the people who hate it agains the ones who like it, it counts as underappreciated.
• 4 votes — The Dragon’s Secret. This is definitely going to happen. For now, here’s another Augusta Huiell Seaman book.
• 3 votes — Lady Audley’s Secret. This will happen…someday. But if you can’t wait, I recommend The Tragedy of Chain Pier. It’s practically the same thing.
• 2 votes — Two Little Women and Treasure House. I’m hoping to do all three Two Little Women books at some point. It’s been too long since I’ve written about Carolyn Wells.
• 1 vote — The Hidden Hand, Mary Jane Holmes, Trustee from the Toolrom. Respectively: someday, hopefully soon, and next time I reread it.
• 0 votes — The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay.   :D :D :D

Anyway. The Three Sides of Paradise Green (out of copyright, but not available online. I read it at the library) is another Augusta Huiell Seaman book, published a few years after The Boarded-up House, and with kind of a similar setup: Two girls, best friends their entire lives, and a house next door with some kind of history-related secret. Except it’s kind of better.

This time the girls are named Susan and Carol, and they’ve just been asked by their English teacher to keep journals for the coming year. The book mostly consists of Susan’s journal entries, although there are a few third-person-narrated scenes. I’m not sure why. They don’t really add anything. Also, you know who else doesn’t add anything? Carol. She’s kind of a drip. Fortunately, very little of the burden of the story falls on Carol’s shoulders. The main mystery-solver here is Sue’s younger sister Helen Roberta, apparently named after Seaman’s own daughter, and variously referred to as Mademoiselle Héléne, Bobs, and the Imp. The Imp is hands down the coolest person in this book, but she’s also — you know how younger siblings can sometimes be more infuriating than anything else in the world? Yeah, that.

The Boarded-up House

A month ago I got an email from a reader, Mick, about Augusta Huiell Seaman. Seaman was an author of girls’ books who wrote from around 1910 though the 1940s, and while her early books were historical novels, she soon found herself a very nice niche writing books about contemporary teenage girls solving mysteries with a historical element. The Boarded-up House is the first of these mysteries, and it’s kind of great.

Joyce Kenway and Cynthia Sprague — best friends since they were little — live almost next door to each other. There’s just one building in between: a Colonial mansion that existed before the town that surrounds it, and which has been shut up for as long as anyone can remember. One afternoon, Joyce’s cat Goliath gets into the house — a board covering one of the basement windows has rotted away — and the girls follow him inside. What they find there is pretty weird: not only is the house still completely furnished, the plates from the occupants’ last meal there are still on the table. The girls decide to investigate and figure out what happened, and eventually they do.

Ads: Pollyanna (yes, again)

Ads: Pollyanna

 

Rosemary

I’m slowly making my way through The Leavenworth Case again (there are things I like better this time around, but there are also things I hate a lot more) and yesterday afternoon I decided I needed a break, so I went looking on Project Gutenberg for a book with a girl’s name in the title, as that seemed like a good way to find a light, fluffy romance.

I didn’t find what I was looking for, exactly. Rosemary, by Josephine Lawrence, (best known, I think, as a Stratemeyer Syndicate author) definitely has a girl’s name in the title, but it didn’t seem like the kind of book I was looking for. It did, however, seem like a book I wanted to read, and I didn’t want to lose track of it, so I abandoned my fluffy romance plans.

Phyllis

The Melting of Molly was nice, but Phyllis was better.

There are some basic similarities — the first-person narration, the particular kind of diary format the author uses, the deliberate obliviousness — but the two books feel fairly different.

Once cause of that, from which most of the others probably follow is that Phyllis is not a widow in her twenties, but a fifteen year old schoolgirl. She starts her diary (which is named Louise) when she and her parents move to the town of Byrdsville for the sake of her mother’s health. It’s never clear what exactly is wrong with the mother, but she’s always been an invalid, she’s going to die soon, and the nurse won’t let her husband and daughter see her because it makes her worse.

Patty’s Butterfly Days

I had meant to finish writing about the Patty Fairfield books in order at some indefinite point in the future, but I had a hankering to reread Patty’s Butterfly Days this week.

Butterfly Days is one of my favorites, I think. I’m pretty sure the only one I’ve read more often is Patty’s Summer Days. In it, Patty is left alone at the seaside with her friend Mona while Mr. Fairfield and Nan take a trip to the mountains. Mona lives in a big, over-decorated mansion, and she and Patty go to a lot of parties, give a few themselves, and are generally unproductive members of society. It’s really enjoyable.

I, um, don’t think I’ve ever had to to this before, but: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Four Girls and a Compact

Four Girls and a Compact is short and predictable, but not in a bad way. Four girls — Loraine, Laura Ann, Billy, and T.O. — are four working girls who share an apartment they call the “B-Hive” because all of their last names begin with B. Loraine is a teacher and an aspiring writer, Laura Ann is an artist whose job has something to do with photography, Billy teaches music, and T.O., the “Talentless One,” sells handkerchiefs in a department store.

All four are tired and overworked, and they decide to go spend the summer in the country. They’re determined to be completely selfish while on vacation, and they sign a “Wicked Compact,” which states that if any of them do anything unselfish during their trip, they will be evicted from the B-Hive.