A Certain Slant of Light

As the month is flying to an end, I thought I'd slide in with some mini-reviews of the latest books I've been reading!

I picked up William John Locke's The Beloved Vagabond because it was one of Maud Hart Lovelace's favorite novels (her copy is actually in a glass case at the Betsy-Tacy Museum), referenced repeatedly in Betsy and the Great World. It is, as it turns out, a very odd book.

For reasons that slowly become clear over the course of the novel, Paragot long since cast aside wealth, education, and name (Paragot is of course an assumed name) to be a feckless drunken wanderer on the face of this earth, who dazzles his acquaintances with brilliant lively talk, but nonetheless holds everyone at arm's length - even the found family that he slowly gathers round himself, which includes our narrator Asticot (who Paragot bought off his mother for half a crown when he discovered the boy reading Paradise Lost; Asticot adores him) and Blanquette the traveling zither player, who finds herself stranded after the elderly violinist who is the other half of her traveling band unexpectedly dies. Paragot, a gifted violinist, flings on the violinist's sequined coat, plays dazzlingly at a peasant weddings, and more or less adopts her.

I can't explain much more without giving away the central mystery, but I will just say that I am fascinated that this was one of Maud Hart Lovelace's favorites, because it's just so different from her own books! But then I guess that's often the case: what you like to write may not be quite the thing that you like to read.

Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives was a gift from troisoiseaux and an absolute roller coaster, as any books about the Shelleys and Byron has to be. This is one of those nonfiction books where the title misleadingly focuses on the most famous people involved: a large part of the book actually revolves around the crusading journalist Leigh Hunt, who was a central figure in the web of relationships that drew many of these second generation Romantic poets in contact with each other.

I was also delighted to learn that the man buried beside Shelley in Rome is some raconteur who met Shelley in the last year of his life, enthralled the whole social circle with wildly inaccurate stories about his past, and after Shelley's death insisted on digging him up and cremating him on the beach, apparently because he just thought that would be so metal. Then he bought to adjoining grave plots, one for Shelley and one for himself, where he was interred decades later under a stone that suggests he and Shelley were bosom buddies, WHEN IN FACT this guy is just some chancer who realized he had stumbled onto an opportunity to clutch the coattails of immortality.

Continuing my Audrey Erskine Lindop read (which kicked off memorably with Details of Jeremy Stretton) with The Self-Appointed Saint! I don't want to spoil this one for skygiants specifically so I will just say that it is a WILD ride. Is it a wild ride that actually hangs together in a vaguely plausible manner? IMO no, but also I didn't really care, why bother my little head about plausibility when the whole thing is so entertainingly nuts.

Doris Gates' Little Vic is perhaps one of THE purest expressions of the Boy Meets Horse genre that I've ever read. The main character loves horses so much that he's nicknamed Pony, and the entire book revolves around his relationship with Little Vic, the colt that he raises and trains and adores.

Gorgeous horse illustrations by Kate Seredy, who either could not be bothered to draw humans when there were horses around (fair!), or was told by the publishers to focus on the horses, as illustrations might make it to obvious to the skittish library buyers of 1951 that Pony is Black. This fact only comes into the narrative about two-thirds of the way through the book, which is... perhaps later than it ought to be... it just seems like something that would probably come up at some point before you meet the book's Token Racist, you know?

Lucretia P. Hale's The Peterkin Papers, which is about a family that is very stupid in an Amelia-Bedelia type fashion. One morning Mrs. Peterkin puts salt in her coffee, and the family summons the chemist to try to remove it, and when he can't they summon the old herb-woman to try to disguise the flavor, and when that doesn't work they turn in desperation to the lady from Philadelphia (their only friend with a brain cell), who suggests... that perhaps Mrs. Peterkin could brew a new cup of coffee!

This was published in 1880, and apparently remained popular with children up through the 1950s. Even as a child I scorned Amelia Bedelia and her ilk, but if this is the sort of thing you like, then it is very much that kind of thing.

And another Lindop, Journey into Stone, which I regret to say was a swing and a miss. Like The Self-Appointed Saint, it doesn't quite come together, but as the book is a mystery novel, this is a pretty big flaw, and also I just didn't like most of the characters. Ah, well, many writers have their off novels!