A Certain Slant of Light

While I’m on the road trip, I won’t be able to keep up with the weekly Wednesday Reading Meme, but as I’m taking a brief break (ending today! Heading out on a camping trip this afternoon!) I thought I’d catch up on some book reviews.

Anne Lindbergh’s Bailey’s Window is a charming 1990s children’s fantasy, extremely short. Obnoxious Bailey goes to visit his cousins in rural Vermont and discovers that he has a magical power: when he paints a window on his bedroom wall, it’s possible to walk through into the painted scene. The character growth by which Bailey becomes less obnoxious seems rushed, but who cares, we’re all here for the magic windows and the windows are fun.

John D. Fitzgerald’s Mama’s Boarding House is a fictionalized adult memoir by the author of the Great Brain books, which are fictionalized children’s memoirs that I read with great enjoyment as a child. The two books share some characters, and it’s at times very strange to see them refracted through such a different lens. For instance, the Great Brain is completely tangential. Not a single harebrained scheme! Enjoyable if you enjoy mid-century family memoirs like Chicken Every Sunday. (Speaking of which, I keep thinking about reading Clarence Day’s Life with Father. Thoughts?)

I don’t usually post about rereads, but Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet is just so much fun, I have to mention it in case someone has not yet heard of the book. rachelmanija’s review perfectly captures what makes the book so excellent: “an absolutely delightful book, and one with depth underneath its breezy surface… While the nuns’ innocence is often very funny, their philosophy and knowledge set is serious and taken seriously, as is that of the hippies. There’s hilarious hijinks, a cast of distinct and mostly very likable characters, clashes of world views and also surprising commonalities in world views, a lot of herb lore, and a tiny but real community that springs up in and around the house.”

Doris Gates’s A Morgan for Melinda is an excellent horse girl book, with horses as fully realized characters right alongside the humans. Melinda initially doesn’t want to learn to ride at all, and agrees only because she thinks it will help her father come to terms with the death of her horse-loving older brother; but after she gets a Morgan horse, she falls so in love with her steed that she decides she had to write a book about the experience.

I enjoyed the writing parts just as much as the horse parts, although I think Gates was perhaps not quite clear enough in her mind exactly when Melinda was writing this: as it was happening or after it was all over? There are clues that point both ways.

Finally, Barbara Michaels’ Be Buried in the Rain, a modern gothic in which the heroine spends the summer at a decaying Virginia mansion to care for her horrible grandmother, who remains as vicious as ever despite a pair of strokes that have left her almost paralyzed. Fantastic atmosphere, an amazing subplot in which the heroine adopts a dog, compelling forward motion - this is not a short book, but I read it in one sitting - but awkward plotting that moves creakily and doesn’t quite come together at the end. Nonetheless, a fantastically creepy ending.