Jayne’s Latest Reading List
Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn
Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page.
But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary’s simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline—a guidebook for getting started on a new path.
Georgie’s plans hit a snag when she comes face to face with an unexpected roommate—Levi Fanning, onetime town troublemaker and current town hermit. But this quiet, grouchy man is more than just his reputation, and he offers to help Georgie with her quest. As the two make their way through her wishlist, Georgie begins to realize that what she truly wants might not be in the pages of her diary after all, but right by her side—if only they can both find a way to let go of the pasts that hold them back.
Review
Kaetrin has favorably reviewed a couple of Clayborn novels and got me interested in trying one. Perhaps I still need to find my way with them. I enjoyed the plot and the characters but felt the story bogged down in the middle.
The main characters are all up inside their heads. I mean there are pages of mental musings and thoughts. I’d say the book is about half and half action:thinking ratio and that’s just a bit too much for me.
The romance is sweet, there is some real character growth, and I enjoyed the relationship between Georgie and her best friend Bel (the labor scene and Bel’s confession were priceless and it’s nice to see that not every character always has it all together). But yeah, way too much thinking. But, I am up for trying another book by this author and seeing if it’s a better fit for me. C
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Jane’s Country Year by Saville Malcolm
At last she reached the brow of the hill … now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley … Still patched with snow the little fields spread like a carpet below her and here and there a farmhouse with barns and golden ricks was clearly seen. Across the plain ran, straight as a ruler, a railway line and she saw a toy train puffing and crawling across the picture.
Malcolm Saville’s classic novel from 1946 is about eleven-year old Jane’s discovery of nature and country life during a year spent convalescing on her uncle’s farm, after having been dangerously ill in post-war London.
This deeply-felt novel was written while Saville was extending his range as a writer, alongside his very successful Lone Pine adventure series, and nature anthologies for children. Inspired by the experiences of Saville’s own god-daughter, this marvellous novel is full of the wonder of discovery, as well the happiness of regaining health, making friends, and learning to love the natural world.
The novel is also a record of rural England eighty years ago, written by one of the great twentieth century English nature writers.
Review
This is another reissue of a classic book by Handheld Press. As discussed in the lengthy forward, it’s an example of British “children’s countryside adventure” type literature. Malcolm Saville wrote many series, such as the Lone Pine books, with this theme but this standalone book takes us along with Jane who is being sent to the country for a year to recover from an unnamed illness that has kept her fairly bedbound in London. Luckily her parents know relatives to whom they can send her off for this amount of time.
The book is divided into chapters that cover each month of Jane’s stay during which the excitement of discovering life on a farm combined with clean country air and good food works its miraculous cure. The end result is that Jane regains her health – becoming happy, plumped out and tan – before heading back to London. Whether this turns out to be a good thing for her – going back to the city – is left unanswered but Saville was definitely didactically making a point about healthy, clean country living outside of dirty, noisy cities.
Saville’s writing style is very much more telling vs showing though he does give readers quite a detailed view of a mid 1940s English farm. Some of this, including hares being shot to keep them out of the harvested wheat and Jane discovering a seeming carpet of dead shrews, might be a bit too matter of fact historical detail. But Saville is very much extolling a simpler time when everyone understood how tightly bound people, the land, and the Church were and that they should all be in harmony.
For a modern reader the book is a bit slow, and Saville’s views on city dwellers vs country workers verge on more than slightly disdainful and simplistic, though also a fascinating glimpse back at a lifestyle now gone. C
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A Little BigFoot: On the Hunt in Sumatra: or, How I Learned There Are Some Things That Really Do Not Taste Like Chicken by Pat Spain
In the course of Pat Spain’s time filming wildlife-adventure TV series, he’s gotten pretty used to being uncomfortable. There’ve been rabid raccoon attacks, days spent in the baking equatorial African sun, and consumption of many revolting local delicacies like fermented mare’s milk. And then there was Sumatra. On the Hunt in Sumatra details the two weeks Pat spent soaking wet with a National Geographic film crew tracking the legendary Orang Pendak through the forests of Indonesia, while tigers, leeches, amorous orangutans, Coldplay fans, a guide named Uncle Happy, two shaman, car demons, and rogue cameramen tracked them. It is, without a doubt, the most inhospitable terrain Pat’s ever encountered, with the highest likelihood of grievous bodily harm. But the payoff is the theory he reached about Orang Pendak, and a 5 a.m. EDM Tai Chi party.
Review
Here I am checking out another of Pat Spain’s books about filming the “Beast Hunter” series. This time he and the crew are in Java and (mainly) Sumatra looking behind the legend of Orang Pendak. The first sections of the book cover their arrival in Indonesia, the difficulties they had reaching the areas they wanted to see, the food, the transport, their local “fixer” who took them to a restaurant whose food he described as “not disgusting” (Pat and the crew actually enjoyed it and returned the next day when they tried something the waiter described as “chicken” that was not chicken. The waiter pointed out a specimen on the street. The specimen chased bugs and meowed.)
Oh, and there’s Pat’s attempt to see if fresh durian is better than the frozen/dried/processed stuff that he’s eaten back at home (his mother-in-law has put down his dislike of it to the fact that “it’s not fresh.”) Pat learns that for him, eating it fresh makes it even worse. For an amusing look at people trying durian, go to youtube and check out the “Irish Try” channel.
Once again I am in awe of people who bravely forge ahead into circumstances that would have me (regretfully) saying “Nope, this is too much for first world me.” Rain that sheeted down in deluge-ic amounts, transport across a volcanic (actually it’s still considered active though it hasn’t erupted in a while) lake that required constant bailing over the course of the 2 hour trip, rain, leeches everywhere, rain, mud up to their knees, mud up to their knees with thorns, rain, nettles, more rain, and rain. But when it wasn’t raining, it was splendid with breathtaking views.
Finally Pat covered the reason why they went to Indonesia – to discover the mythology behind and check reported sightings of an Orang Pendak – the short, hairy hominid that locals know for a fact is not an orangutan or a gibbon. Does this creature still exist? Is it just a misidentified ape? Did the legends begin when Homo floresiensis and homo sapiens both inhabited this area? The discussion is fascinating. B
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Thanks for sharing your reading, Jayne!
I see a picture of the cover of Silver Queendom by Dan Koboldt. Are your comments on that title missing?
@Kareni: Oops. No, that’s a mistake. I didn’t remember that I’d already done a DNF review of it.
Ah, thank you!