Angieville

For the past couple of days I have been somewhat swallowed up in Eva Ibbotson's The Morning Gift . This was the one Ibbotson historical I'd somehow missed. I'm going to finish it tonight, so a review will be forthcoming. But until then, please have this—Christopher Plummer's unparalleled recitation of "Brown Penny" by W.B. Yeats. A line from this poem makes a brief but shatteringly perfect appearance in The Morning Gift, and I can't . . . I can't get it out of my head. 

I was so excited to find another Eva Ibbotson book! Awhile back I blew through the wonderful A Song for Summer , A Countess Below Stair s , A Company of Swans , and The Morning Gift . When I surfaced again, I found myself really hoping the magic spell wouldn't end there. Happily there was one more sweet historical in store for me. The Reluctant Heiress is a (retitled) re-issue of Ibbotson's Magic Flutes , which was originally published in 1982. It is set in the 1920s and revolves around the outrageously funny and touching members of the Viennese Opera Company, in particular a young woman named Tessa who eats, drinks, and breathes music and is the heart and soul of the company. First things first. The prologue opens with the following lines: They were both born under the sign of Gemini and for those who believe in the stars as arbiters of fate, this must have seemed the link that bound them. She herself was to invoke the heavens when at last they met. "Could I be your S...

...Sigh.

Once again Ibbotson shows how apt she is at expressing just how her character is feeling, in such a way that the reader sets the book down in her lap and sighs, "Yes. That is exactly how it feels." She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood--it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book. I remember feeling that way when I was a teenager. The first time I read Middlemarch , passages from A Tale of Two Cities , most of Shakespeare. Certainly Dickinson. The feeling of making contact on the page with someone long gone, at a time when it is so difficult making any contact at all in real life. When we first meet Harriet, it is indeed difficult to find an aspect of her life that is not dreary and isolated. Kept on an unbelievably tight rein by her scholar father and spinster aunt, her only outlet is the weekly ballet lessons that ha...

What wordy, frothy fun Ibbotson's books are. Perfect going on a trip books. In fact, reading them makes me wish I was going somewhere, as her heroines always seem to be off somewhere new and exciting and exotic. But since I am not going anywhere (exotic or otherwise) in the near future, getting lost in them has proved a wonderful balm for my It's mid-March and Still Snowing blues. Anna is a Russian countess whose family is forced to flee their wealth and their home after her father is killed in the Russian Revolution. Completely displaced, living in a flat in London with her former governess, she determines to support her ailing mother and younger brother by taking a job as a maid at the country estate of the Earl of Westerholme. Rupert, the young Earl, is recently home from the war, wounded and desperately trying to save the destitute estate he didn't want to inherit in the first place. You see, he promised his older brother just before he died that he would do anything in...

Set in Austria and London just before and during World War II, A Song for Summer follows a young woman named Ellen Carr who takes a job as a housekeeper at an unusual private school in the Austrian Alps. I knew this book and I would get on when Ellen first arrived at Schloss Hallendorf to find a tortoise on wheels speeding across the lawn. It looked much as tortoises do, its neck extended, its demeanor purposeful--but fastened to its back end was a small platform with two wheels on which it scooted as if on roller skates. "It's Achilles," said Sophie. "His back legs were paralyzed and he was dragging himself along. We thought we'd have to have him destroyed and then Marek came and made him those wheels." Soon after the well-equipped tortoise, Ellen encounters Professor Chomsky who teaches metalwork and swims naked in the lake at all hours, Professor Ritter who teaches drama and encourages the children to be kitchen utensils and to give birth to themselves, ...