Just Sweethearts

Just Sweethearts, by Harry Stillwell Edwards, is subtitled “a Christmas Love Story,” but it’s not really a Christmas story at all, although it does make a halfhearted stab at the Unity of Christmastimes. It starts with a Christmas Eve meet cute, and ends the following Christmas Eve. I suspect the subtitle was mostly an excuse to publish an edition with a fancy Christmas-themed binding.

Two years ago I spent a day in December at the library and read all the Christmas stories I could get my hands on, plus this. I promptly forgot the title, but I’ve thought of it from time to time over the past couple of years, and when I finally figured out what it was, I reread it to see if I could figure out why it was so memorable, and whether it was as terrible an excuse for a Christmas story as I remembered. And it was definitely the latter, but the former still has me stumped.

Set in Silver

After two extremely unsatisfying books, I was beginning to wonder whether I really liked fluffy romances or if I’d just been imagining it. Fortunately, there was a third, less unsatisfying book sitting on my shelves.

He Comes Up Smiling

It makes me a little bit sad when I read something light and fluffy and slightly absurd and I don’t like it very much. Part of it is that these books exist for no other purpose than to be fun, so it’s disappointing when they don’t quite get there. The other part is that I feel like there’s something wrong with me for not connecting with these books, like the fact that I didn’t have fun reading them means I’m not fun. I want to enjoy them — I try so hard to enjoy them — but the fact remains that probably two out of three silly, fun books leave me cold, and that I have a secret fear that that third book will never arrive.

This past week, I started with He Comes Up Smiling, by Charles Sherman. It’s about a tramp, which is kind of cool; you don’t get tramps as romantic heroes too often. And I found it really charming for a couple of chapters, as the Watermelon hung out with his hobo friends and really enjoyably scammed a barber.

Diane of the Green Van

In 1913, a Chicago publishing house called Reilly & Britton offered a $10,000 prize for the best manuscript submitted to them. About five hundred manuscripts were submitted, and eventually it was announced that Leona Dalrymple (later the author of Jimsy: the Christmas Kid) had won the prize for her novel Diane of the Green Van. She had also submitted another manuscript to the competition, and they were going to publish that, too.

So, is Diane of the Green Van worthy of the prize? Not having seen the other manuscripts, I obviously can’t judge, but this one? Is insane.

Love Stories

I blame Eleanor for the amount of Mary Roberts Rinehart I’ve been reading lately. Every time I move on to something else, she tells me which Rinehart she’s reading and I get jealous.

Anyway, I read Love Stories last week. I was pretty sure I hadn’t read it before, but the first story seemed awfully familiar. It turns out I’d already read it in a magazine. But it holds up well. I mean, it’s Rinehart. Of course it does.

This book is kind of a precursor to the hospital romance comics from the 1970s that I read at my grandmother’s apartment when I was younger. All but the last two stories are set in hospitals, and all but the last one are romances. Lots of doctors and nurses. Lots of incidents recycled from or for K.

The Yoke

In a comment on my last post, Tracey suggested I read The Yoke, by Hubert Wales, because, like The Career of Katherine Bush, it features a woman who has premarital sex and doesn’t get punished for it. So I did.

It’s an astonishing book, especially for 1908. It’s also a super creepy one, for any time.

See, Angelica is forty, gray haired and still beautiful. She never married because the man she was in love with died of cancer during their engagement. His son, Maurice, is now twenty-two, and having a hard time stopping himself from having sex with prostitutes, so Angelica starts sleeping with him for his protection.

According to Hubert Wales, this is how the world works: young men, unable to control their sexual desires, sleep with prostitutes. Then they get STDs and their lives are ruined. To be fair, he allows Angelica to have sexual desires too, and that’s great. Here’s the catch, though: Angelica has raised Maurice since he was two. For all intents and purposes — except genetic ones — she’s his mom.

Everyone feeling uncomfortable? Okay, let’s move on.

Four books by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Say hi to Inez Haynes Gillmore. I know some of you are familiar with her, but I suspect most of you are not. She could easily be your new favorite author. She’s pretty good. But mostly what she is is versatile.

I read a book of hers the other day called Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce. It made me re-examine three of Gillmore’s other books, just because it seemed so unlikely that they all could have come from the same person. So, there’s Gertrude Haviland, a divorce novel — and please don’t try to tell me that’s not a genre, because I won’t listen — and then there’s an adorable children’s book, a fluffy romance/adventure/ghost story/paean to old furniture, and a disturbing, bloody, and terrifyingly upbeat allegorical feminist fantasy. All of them are, in their separate ways, perfect.

Cinderella Jane

Cinderella Jane, by Marjorie Benton Cooke, has a lot of things in it that I love. The quiet girl who cleans all the artists’ studios turns out to be awesome! And beautiful! The hero is kind of a dork! The heroine and this girl who was in love with the hero become best friends! He/she fell in love with his/her wife/husband! A wife in a mental institution!

Patricia Brent, Spinster

Here goes possibly the nicest of the reader recommendations from week before last. Thank you Mark; I am exceedingly grateful.

I tend not to deal well with characters who seem to go out of their way to mire themselves in difficulties, but Patricia Brent, Spinster — by Herbert George Jenkins — did it so charmingly that I can’t really bring myself to complain. The title character overhears some of the catty older women at her boarding house gossiping about her — and, incidentally, adding a few years to her age — and tries to get back at them by casually referring to a fiancé over dinner that night. She’s not ready for the questions they throw at her, and she ends up being a lot more specific about the fake fiancé than she intended. Like, to the point of making up a name, rank and regiment for him. This is sort of embarrassingly awkward, obviously, and then it gets worse. Patricia goes out to dinner the following night for a nonexistent date with the fictional Major Brown and some of her fellow boarders follow her, which, a) aren’t you glad you’re not friends with them? and b) things are now acutely, humiliatingly awkward.

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 Kingdom Round the Corner

I kind of knew from the first few paragraphs of The Kingdom Round the Corner (by Coningsby Dawson) that it was going to push a significant portion of my buttons, possibly in a slightly embarrassing way. And it does, for about the first hundred and fifty pages.

Lord Taborley leaves the army in 1919 and goes straight to London, where Terry Beddow meets him at the train station in accordance with a promise she made when he left in 1914. The promise also stipulated that they were going to go off and get married immediately, but once he’s seen her and talked to her, he knows he can’t take that bit for granted anymore. And before the afternoon is over he discovers the reason: General Braithwaite, formerly Tabs’ valet — something Braithwaite is concealing. And Braithwaite clearly earned his promotions, and is a reasonably good guy — even though Terry’s infatuated with him, Tabs would probably be okay with him if Braithwaite hadn’t left Ann, the parlormaid to whom he was practically engaged, to think he was dead.

The Unspeakable Perk

I was totally fine with The Island Mystery until I read The Unspeakable Perk. Now I wish George A. Birmingham and Samuel Hopkins Adams had traded books. That way The Island Mystery would have been charming as it needed to be and The Unspeakable Perk would have been as cynical as it ought to have been. For the record, I am only comparing the two because they’re novels about American millionaires’ daughters on fictional islands. If you add in Romance Island, this starts looking dangerously like a trope.

That said, I like The Unspeakable Perk a lot better than The Island Mystery. If there is one thing Samuel Hopkins Adams is super consistent about, it’s his charm, and that’s one of the few things that will win me over to an otherwise unsatisfying book.

The Lamp in the Desert

I don’t know why I’m still reading books by someone who names her heroes things like ‘Everard,’ but here’s another Ethel M. Dell for you: The Lamp in the Desert. She doesn’t let you forget that title; the lamp motif is everywhere.

The Lamp in the Desert is set in India, and shares one minor character with The Way of an Eagle. I like it when authors do that — just enough crossover between books to let you know that they’re all set in the same universe. Especially if, as with Dell, you have to posit an alternate universe where human behavior bears only a vague resemblance to reality to enjoy her books in the first place. Dell always verges on terrible, but she does it in a very distinctive way. Her romances are almost as convoluted as they are passionate, but she mostly manages to make them appealing, too. It’s just a bit terrifying to think that all of these ridiculous people are supposed to exist simultaneously.

Sylvia: the story of an American countess

Sylvia is nineteen, the daughter of a woman from California and an Italian Count (both dead), and the most beautiful woman in Europe. But while her aunt wants her to marry a Duke — unless maybe a prince is available — Sylvia says that, if she ever marries at all, she’ll choose an American man. Philip Monroe would be happy to be that man. Eric Fielding has to deny to himself that he’d be happy to be that man, since he’s engaged to a girl in New York. Dick Ames knows there’s no likelihood of his being that man, so he becomes her good friend instead.

Really, though, Sylvia’s not interested in marrying anybody. But her aunt is really pushing the Duke, so Sylvia runs away to her other aunt in California and changes her name to Barbara Gordon. She — obviously — will henceforth be known as Batgirl, to avoid confusion.

Lavender and Old Lace

Lavender and Old Lace had most of the right pieces to be awesome, but instead it was lopsided, frustrating, and, most importantly, not engaging. I’ll put up with a lot of structural problems and disagreements with the author’s worldview for characters I can like and believe in, but Myrtle Reed never quite pulled it together.

Our heroine is Ruth Thorne, a newspaperwoman who has taken the summer off, partly for the sake of her nerves and partly at the request of Jane Hathaway, her only living relative. Ruth and Miss Hathaway have never met, but Miss Hathaway has received a legacy and is using it to go abroad, and she wants someone to take care of her house. Ruth arrives a week after Miss Hathaway’s departure and finds that the house is quiet and beautiful and that her only responsibilities are to take charge of the unmanageable servant, Hepsey, and to light a lamp in the attic window every night. Miss Hathaway doesn’t explain why the lamp must be lighted, and Hepsey doesn’t know, but she suspects it has something to do with Miss Ainslie, another spinster living nearby. Miss Ainslie and Miss Hathaway grew up together. They’re both in their mid-fifties, and both seem to have some kind or romance lurking in their pasts. But Miss Ainslie is shy, sweet, and reclusive, and lives in a house full of beautiful things, while Miss Hathaway, when she returns, is cranky and bossy, and keeps her Colonial mahogany furniture in the attic.