Almost everyone’s names are changed, as are some nationalities. The Ruritanian country of Rhaetia retains its name, but its emperor is now Leopold rather than Maximilian. And Princess Virginia adds some American blood to Sylvia’s mix of English and German. Things are a little more up to date — it’s a different English monarch that provides the heroine and her mother with a home, and there’s a sprinking of automobiles in Virginia that aren’t present in Sylvia. The dialog is a little snappier (as Jenn pointed out), and there are places where the plot has been smoothed over a little, making it seem less as if A.M. Williamson made it up as she went along. If you’re going to read one of these, Virginia is better, but again: same book.

Sylvia/Virginia is the daughter of a dead German Grand Duke, brought up in England by her English/half English mother. She hero-worships the young Emperor of Rhaetia, and plans never to marry, since she couldn’t bear to marry anyone but him. Except then it turns out that the Emperor — or at least his Chancellor — thinks she would be a very suitable wife for him.

You would think Sylvia/Virginia would be happy about that, but no — she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. She wants Max/Leo to fall in love with her. So she and her mother, plus a governess and a French maid, set out for Rhaetia incognito to give him a chance to do just that. And then, you know, hijinks ensue, including a final twist I saw coming a mile away but enjoyed more than the rest of the book anyway.

And, you know, it’s fine. I read it in one sitting, and then I basically read it again. But the more I think about it, the more annoyed I get, because the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous and unnecessary. I mean, talk about first world problems, right?

Look at it this way: you’re Sylvia/Virginia. You’re a princess. The guy you have a crush on wants to marry you, but instead of congratulating yourself on your good luck, you decide that not only is this the only man in the world you’re willing to marry, you’re only wiling to marry him once you know he would have fallen in love with you even if he hadn’t already decided you were going to get married. That’s…convoluted and crazy, right? And also not something a princess raised on the idea of an arranged marriage would come up with?

It’s just…she keeps putting him through these tests. She has to see how he behaves when he doesn’t know who she is, and how he behaves when he thinks she doesn’t know who he is. And then, even when she’s sure he’s in love with her, she won’t drop the masquerade until he’s actually said it. Only the dialogue that follows doesn’t quite match the dialogue she’d imagined, so everyone gets a chance to be stupid for a little longer. I understood why Sylvia/Virginia was insulted by the offer the Emperor makes, but she spent so much time creating openings for him to mess up that eventually there was going to be a test he wouldn’t pass.

There were so many times Sylvia/Virginia could have just gone home, assured of a happy ending, and she just wouldn’t. And Max/Leo wasn’t much better. Deciding that everything important in your life should take second place to someone you’ve known for a week isn’t romantic, it’s irresponsible. And I don’t enjoy watching people make bad decisions.

And then the Chancellor is made to be the villain, which is crazy. All he’s trying to do is arrange for the actual marriage that’s supposed to take place between Sylvia/Virginia and the Emperor. Why is it wrong for him to discourage the Emperor’s attachment to Sylvia/Virginia’s alter ego? Why is it wrong for him to tell the Emperor that the girl is clearly lying to him when, you know, she is? Why be so offended by the idea that Sylvia/Virginia and her mother came to Rhaetia to entrap the Emperor, seeing as that’s exactly what they did? And obviously the Emperor doesn’t have the reader’s knowledge, but you know who does? A.M. Williamson.

So, yeah. When the Chancellor tells the Emperor he must be out of his senses, I can’t help but agree.

I’m sorry I’m late to the L.M. Montgomery party, but I’m not sorry I’m getting to read these books for the first time now. There are children’s books that I’ve read as an adult and wished I had read as a kid, but Jane of Lantern Hill isn’t one of them. Yes, reading it at the appropriate age would have been a very different experience, but I don’t think it would have necessarily been a better one; I have so much more context for things now. This is just me trying to rationalize, though. Mostly I can’t imagine enjoying Jane of Lantern Hill more when I was a kid than I did yesterday.

The setup is strikingly similar to that of The Blue Castle — the unhappy girl living in a strict, female-dominated household whose only escape is via her imagination, the awful aunts and uncles and the privileged cousin, etc. But Jane is a kid, and her family includes some non-awful people: her mother and father, who are estranged. Jane and her mother live with Jane’s grandmother, who basically hates everyone but Jane’s mother, and takes active pleasure in making Jane’s life miserable.

This is abuse. Her grandmother uses everything Jane does to reinforce a narrative where Jane is useless and terrible at everything and has “low tastes.” Anything that Jane does well or likes to do is either ignored or food for further criticism. Every nice thing that her grandmother gives is is secretly meant to make her unhappy. And Jane responds, as people being abused often do, by becoming bad at all of the things she’s told she’s bad at. It’s pretty uncomfortable reading.

But this is a mostly cheerful children’s book, and so there’s something irrepressibly humorous and interested in Jane that her grandmother can’t kill, and she gets to exercise those faculties when she goes away to spend the summer with her father on Prince Edward Island.

Jane’s first summer with her father is almost too perfect. They instinctively get each other, in a way that was enough like an idealized version of my relationship with my father that it almost made me uncomfortable. But only almost. What’s great about this section, though, is Jane’s confidence. Free of her grandmother’s influence, she knows she’s capable of doing all sorts of things. It’s interesting that so many of those things are in the areas of cooking and housekeeping — things her grandmother never repeatedly told Jane was awful at because she never allowed her to try them in the first place.

Even better is the fact that Jane takes some of that confidence back home with her at the end of the summer. And yes, she stands up for herself a little more, but my favorite thing is that her knowledge that she’s a capable person sticks with her and allows her to continue to be a capable person, doing better in school and becoming less clumsy. It’s great.

So, yeah, this book was so good for me in so many ways. I didn’t love the ending as much as I loved the rest, but I also don’t see how else Montgomery could have sorted things out, so I don’t really want to complain.

When I was finished with Jane of Lantern Hill I went on reading people’s recommendations/things I’ve waited for too long to read. Next up: The Adventure of Princess Sylvia, because I got mixed up and didn’t remember I was supposed to read Princess Virginia instead.

ETA: I kep meaning and forgetting to say that the book Jane of Lantern Hill reminds me of most is Keineth, which is a recommendation in itself.

The book is The Blue Castle, and I expect that some of you have already read it, because it’s by L.M. Montgomery, and if you love Anne of Green Gables and are in the habit of reading public domain fiction, you’ve probably read everything of hers that’s available. I sort of love Anne of Green Gables, just…selectively. And The Blue Castle isn’t public domain here in the US, but Project Gutenberg Australia is a beautiful thing.

Anyway. This is one of those books where a woman with a deeply unsatisfying life turns over a new leaf — or has one turned over for her — and comes into her own. Like Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce, or Now, Voyager. Or A Woman Named Smith, but less so. It’s such self-indulgent fantasy, but it’s my favorite kind. The heroine of The Blue Castle is Valency Stirling, a 29 year old spinster, frustrated and unhappy and firmly under the thumb of her widowed mother and a vast array of aunts and uncles. When she visits a doctor to ask about her recurring chest pain and he diagnoses her with terminal heart disease, she finds that knowing she’s only got a year to live is what she needed to cure her of her fear of her family. She strikes out on her own, becoming nurse/housekeeper/companion to the dying daughter of the local drunk, and then marrying a man who is rumored to have done all sorts of terrible things.

She gets the material things she’s been wanting — a husband, nice clothes, a home of her own, better looks — but, more importantly, she learns to speak her mind and trust in her own judgment and, you know, have fun. And it’s a delightful journey to accompany her on. There were things I didn’t love, too: the specific awfulness of Valency’s family would have worked better for me if Montgomery rubbed their faces in Valency’s transformation a bit more, for example, and I would have liked some of the romantic bits to be taken down exactly one notch. Also, there was one of those passages where a woman discovers she’s in love and doesn’t expect anything to come of it but somehow feels that her unrequited love has transformed and validated her life, and I find passages like that kind of irritating. On the whole, though, The Blue Castle is approximately as perfect as I want it to be.

There were ways in which I identified with Valency very much. Her feelings — at least, the ones that don’t feel a little performative — are real feelings. But one thing that interested me as I read was the ways in which I didn’t identify with her. I (obviously) read a lot of old books, but somehow they don’t usually make me think of the ways in which certain things — the things that have an impact on my day to day life — have changed since they were written. This one did. I’m not that much younger than Valency, and I have things in common with her, but…I don’t know. In Valency’s world whether a woman is married or unmarried is barely her choice, and I took a moment this evening to be thankful that even whether or not you want to be married is a choice in mine. It was nice.

As for new content here…I’m in a bit of a reading drought at the moment. This is a thing that happens, I know, but it always makes me feel kind of guilty and bereft. Like, reading is so easy; why don’t I just do it. And what else am I going to do, anyway?

I probably should have known this was coming, because I hadn’t wanted to read anything but fanfiction for a few weeks, and that’s a pretty good sign of incipient reading fatigue. Oh well. I’m alternating between trying to power through it and waiting it out, and eventually one of those things will work.

The premise is kind of excellent, to a point, and if the book had revolved around Owen Jephson, underwriter for Lloyd’s of London, I think I would have liked it more. Jephson specializes in insuring incedibly peculiar things: he’s insured an actor against losing weight, a duchess against rain at her garden party, etc. I want very badly for Herbert George Jenkins to have written a book about Jephson, but sadly the world doesn’t work that way. And Biggers is more concerned first with Allan, Lord Harrowby, who wants to insure his wedding date, and then, more centrally, with Dick Minot, who Lloyd’s sends to Florida and protect their assets by making sure that Harrowby’s wedding to the beautiful Cynthia Meyrick goes as planned. Minot, inevitably, falls in love with Cynthia almost at first sight, and that’s only the first of many complications — there are jewel thieves, long-lost relatives, blackmail, and a society matron who hires a guy to write bon mots for her. And that list barely scrapes the surface.

In general, I really, really like about the first 3/4 of any given Earl Derr Biggers book, but this one felt more consistent. I never liked it as much as the beginning of Seven Keys to Baldpate or The Agony Column, but I liked it pretty much equally all the way through. Possibly that was because it was pretty intensely predictable, but that was okay, beasue it was all pretty silly and fun, too.

This is one of those books I sort of vaguely like but can’t work up any enthusiasm about, and I don’t know whether that’s my fault, or if it’s that Biggers didn’t expend any effort on characterization, or that the most interesting character disappeared after the first few chapters or what. I suspect a lot of people will enjoy it more than I did.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but this is a really big tote bag.

I usually limit myself to as many books as I can carry in my hands, so when my arms started to hurt, I went to check out. But once I’d gotten my books into my bag, the woman at the counter said, “you know, there are more books in the other building.” That was my downfall.

Anyway, here are the things I got, in reverse order as I unpack.

I didn’t buy all the Nero Wolfe books — just the cuter, older paperbacks and In the Best Families because it’s In the Best Families. Apparently my cat likes Nero Wolfe too.

Not the Felix Salten one with the deer, but the Marjorie Benton Cooke one with the people. The woman who helped me check out said she heard it was pretty racy, which seems unlikely, but I told her I would be pleased if that turned out to be the case.

I keep meaning to try Mary Stewart. And at this point I had well over $10 worth of books, so these were basically free.

Some miscellaneous paperbacks–One Hundred  and One Dalmatians  because my copy is missing pages, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold because I can’t find my mom’s copy, and a romance by Meredith Duran for no reason at all.

This is the Mary Roberts Rinehart portion of the haul. All of these books are more battered than all of the other books, but who cares? I own a copy of K
now.

This is the Ethel M. Dell portion of the haul. I…own a copy of The Way of an Eagle now. So, uh, that’s a thing.

The last few miscellaneous things: Rose in Bloom, my favorite Alcott book I’ve never owned; Trustee from the Toolroom, which I buy whenever I find it so I can give it as a gift; and Brat Farrar, which I own a couple of times over, because this copy is super cute. I assume the girl in the sheet on the cover is Eleanor, but I don’t understand why.

Now that I’ve read a couple of reviews of the play, though, everything makes sense. The last third or so of the book, the section full of unpleasant people and awkward situations that made me wonder why I had liked anyone or been invested in the book up to that point — that was the bulk of the play. The first half or so, in which John Hemingway goes to Paris and is desperately lonely until he meets and begins a relationship with American-born Inez de Pierrefond is apparently original to the book.

John is a nice but occasionally super depressed architect studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. Inez is from Louisiana, and is about as French as one can get while still being an American, and is technically a widow, although she left her horrible and possibly German husband before he died. They meet in a treehouse, which is kind of great. Their relationship is pretty interesting. There’s a lot of very trite bits, but John is pretty convincingly torn between his attraction for Inez and his morals. He’s also pretty convincingly a massive dork. And Inez is pretty awesome, and eventually wins him over to her way of thinking, including the idea that marriage is a prison.

That one, obviously, isn’t going to go over well in John’s hometown of Delphi, OH. And John’s transformation when they get back there makes sense, although it’s kind of disappointing. And I guess that’s how I feel about everything else that happens in Delphi, too. I keep wanting to say that everyone is out of character, but I can’t put my finger on any specific way in which that’s true. And it’s not terrible, but after the Paris section, which I was really enjoying, it’s disappointing.

Now that I know roughly what was in the play, I keep falling into the trap of thinking of the Delphi section as Hurlbut’s work and the Paris section as Fenollosa’s, which isn’t fair because Fenollosa wrote the whole book. Also, not having read the play, I don’t want to make assumptions. I guess I’ll have to try one of Fenollosa’s other books at some point, to see how she does on her own.

The Mystery has a Frankenstein-esque framing narrative, which takes place aboard a Navy ship, the Wolverine. The ship is sort of wandering around the ocean, blowing up wrecks, when it comes across a schooner called the Laughing Lass. This is odd for two reasons: first, that the Laughing Lass had disappeared two years before with eminent scientist Dr. Schermerhorn, journalist Ralph Slade, and its captain and crew. The second reason is that the ship is entirely uninhabited, beyond the dead bodies of a few rats. That, and there’s food and still-warm ashes from a fire, so the Laughing Lass can’t have been unmanned for long. Then…well, more mysterious stuff happens. And eventually one of a large number of missing people shows up and tells his story, and it’s absorbing and awful.

I usually have trouble with books fueled by impending doom, but not here. Or rather, I was pretty freaked out the entire time I was reading, but not in my usual, irrationally upset about bad things that haven’t happened yet way. Actually, I think I might have been reacting to it the way people are supposed to react to scary books and movies but that I never do. I mean, I’m not going to start reading more scary stuff, because I’m still a wuss, but I’m closer to understanding the appeal than I was a week ago.

I should probably also mention the animal slaughter. There was a lot of it. It was very effectively horrible in the traditional sense of the word, and I can’t believe I managed to get all the way through it. I just — there are a lot of dead seals, okay? A lot.

In conclusion: way to go, Samuel Hopkins Adams. I trusted you, and now I don’t. And I guess it could just be Stewart Edward White at fault, but, not having a whole lot of information on the subject, I’m going to blame them equally.

Helen knows that Andrew is likely to buy it, and, having bought it, even more likely to go off with it leaving her in charge of the farm again, so instead she buys it herself, and sets out with Mifflin to learn the trade. And although Helen is fat — according to her own description — and just shy of forty, and Mifflin is short, bald and redheaded, the story goes on very much as it would if they were, say, the caravaning pair in Diane of the Green Van.

I probably wanted Parnassus on Wheels to be either a little bit lighter or a little bit more serious, and I definitely wanted it to be a lot more leisurely than it was, but basically everything is as it should be, and I’m not in a mood to criticize it for not being perfect. I mean, it’s not my new favorite book, but it should be someone’s. There a sort of sequel, apparently, called The Haunted Bookshop, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it.