Mystery/Romance in a British Country House

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, Ally Carter

I almost passed this book up because I hated the cover. Good thing I reconsidered, because this was really enjoyable.

Maggie Chase writes successful cozy mysteries. Ethan Wyatt writes hi-tech thrillers. Their writings certainly don't vibe, and neither do they. Maggie also hates Christmas because everything bad in her life that's happened to her has happened around Christmas, like her parents dying, finding out her husband was sleeping with her best friend, "little" things like that. Ethan's bigger than life and for some reason he keeps calling her "Marcie." So she's really excited when she's invited to a real English house party—yes, in England!—at the home of Eleanor Ashley, queen of the murder mystery genre (think Agatha Christie).

Except that Ethan is also an invited guest. Well, she'll put up with him to spend Christmas with Eleanor Ashley, not to mention an entire houseful of guests who don't seem to like Eleanor very much and resent the fact that these two Americans are crashing their party.

And then Eleanor vanishes. Everyone but Maggie thinks something bad has happened, but Maggie's sure this is a test. Eleanor wants to quit writing and retire, and this mystery is a way of working out her successor. The person who solves it will take over her series.

But if that's true, why is someone trying to kill her? And why is Ethan not the awful guy she thought he was?

There's a couple of blips in this: at one point Maggie gets a head injury and Ethan's all in a hurry to get her to a doctor, fearing a concussion, and next they're taking refuge from a snowstorm in a cottage and neither of them seem very worried at all. But most of all this was great fun.
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Comfort Read #3

The Tuckers: The Cottage Holiday, Jo Mendel

I've had this book since I was about ten years old, and I read it every Christmas. It was part of a series that began with The Wonderful House, about the Tucker family (dad, stay-at-home but active mom, five kids, a big furry dog, and a black cat) moving to a big house in the fictional town of Yorkville from a city apartment.

The older, active kids (Tina, Terry, and Merry) get the lion's share of the other books, but this is the first of the two that center around Penny. Penny, age 7, is susceptible to colds, stays home sick a lot, and is starting to resent it. She wants to have adventures like her older siblings. Even her little brother Tom is stronger than she is. As the story opens, she wishes the family could spend Christmas at their lake house, where they could play in the snow and skate and romp to their hearts' content. To her surprise, her doctor says that if she takes precautions, she's healthy enough to go. And so they decamp to the lake, where they truly have an adventurous Christmas, contending with an abandoned baby, a cougar that's killing local livestock, and Penny's search for her true self.

It's told in simple vocabulary, but Christmas at Lake Annabelle sounds like a blast; I would have loved to have spent it with the Tuckers. And Penny also gets a surprise about herself. "Very kringly," as Betty Roberts of Remember WENN might say.
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History--Yes. Commentary--No.

The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg

Christmas in the past wasn't all Santa Claus bringing gifts, red-nosed reindeer, and Frosty the snowman (who isn't even a Christmas thing, originally). Christmas in the past was a time of evil spirits slipping through the thin veil that separates the real and spiritual world, ghost stories, and companions of "Santa" (St. Nicholas) who threatened to punish naughty children by eating them, opening up their stomachs, or putting them into a bag and taking them to be punished.

Clegg takes trips to Europe to investigate locations that still play up these Christmas visitors, including Wales to follow a Mari Lywd parade and Sweden to investigate Santa Lucia and the Netherlands to see St. Nicholas and Zwarte Piet, and of course the infamous Krampus. She also visits Carnival in Venice, because many Christmas customs that were discarded once people stopped celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas migrated to Carnival. She gives us her point of view of these celebrations, but also includes an endless litany of how the past was racist, sexist, and every other kind of bad "ist." It was very off-putting to have the narrative interrupted so many times with this "but!" commentary. It would have been best to deal with it once, in a foreward, and stop with the lecturing. I would have appreciated a deeper delving into the customs rather than just her POV of them without the constant criticism of the past.
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If The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Ended Differently

Good Spirits, B.K. Borison

I ugly cried at the end of this.

For years, Nolan Callahan, formerly a 19th century Irish fisherman who drowned during a storm, has been one of a cadre of "Ghosts of Christmas Past." They visit people who have, like Ebenezer Scrooge, done something bad in their past and who need to atone for it. It adds a little interest to his colorless afterlife. But then he's assigned to Harriet York, a free-spirited, mouthy young woman who runs an antique store (having displeased her rigid lawyer family for years with her career choice). He can't see what on earth Harriet has to atone for; indeed, after several visits to her past, he starts to feel that several of the people in her life need to atone to her!

In return, Harriet is suddenly making Nolan do things he hasn't been able to do since his death: taste, smell, feel. He has no idea what's going on, especially when his trips with Harriet into what's supposed to be her past turn out to be excursions into his past.

I really liked Harriet and hated her simply awful family, trying to press her into a mold she simply didn't fit into. Nolan is also a great character, especially in his interactions with his supervisor, the enigmatic Isabella. The antique store and its contents are almost another character in themselves; I'd live there!

Especially for fans of the television series of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, this is a touching paranormal read.

Comfort Read #2

Sleigh Bells for Windy Foot, Frances Frost

This one goes way back for me, probably 1965-1966 from the Stadium School library, second in a four-book series about the Clark family living on their small farm in post-war Vermont. It's the story of Toby Clark, the eldest of three children, and his adventures with his family and his pony Windy Foot, given to him for his 12th birthday in the opening novel, Windy Foot at the County Fair.

In that story, Toby met Tish Burnham, daughter of widower Jerry Burnham, an owner of fine race horses. Tish rides her pony in the pony race at the county fair, which Toby wins, but they become fast friends. In this book the Clarks prepare for a Christmas visit from Tish and her dad.

It floors me every time I read this book how much work the Clark family does each day, but they still have time to go to carol sings and Christmas shopping, and have a Christmas party. I get tired just from Toby's daily schedule having to help milk the cows, chopping wood for his mother's stove, and four million other farm chores, plus in this story he cuts down a larger two-passenger sleigh so he can take Tish on a sleigh ride with Windy Foot! And later he has to guard the house against a bear that is killing farm livestock. And he and his sister Betsy still have time to go into the woods to gather Christmas greens, and play with rhyming little brother Johnny (who, I admit, can get a little annoying!).

This is one of those warm, old-fashioned stories you read with a cup of cocoa in an armchair. Nostalgia by the mile. Comfort. Home. Family.

The History of St. Nicholas and How He Became Santa...Maybe

Santa Claus Worldwide, Tom A. Jerman

It's simple, right? Way back when the United States was just a collection of colonies, the Dutch brought a gift giver named "St. Nicholas" our way. They called him "Sinter Klaus." Years, a poem by Clement C. Moore and an artist named Thomas Nast formed him into the "Santa Claus" we know today. And around the world there are related gift givers like "Father Christmas" (the "English Santa") and "Pere Noël," and a few offbeat ones, like Santa Lucia and La Befana.

Well, hold on, because a lot of the "St. Nicholas brought over by the Dutch in New Amsterdam [today's New York City] lore" was made up by Washington Irving. And there was a poem that proceeded Moore's Visit from St. Nicholas called "Old Sancte Claus" that featured Santa being pulled by...yes, reindeer. And Thomas Nast...

Jerman tries to make sense of all this and all the other "Santa" antecedents, including the grimy companions of St. Nicholas, like Krampus, Pere Fouttard, Pelznichol, Belsnickel, etc. whom he believes are the real ancestors of today's Santa Claus, not St. Nicholas. And along the way we learn more about some of those odd gift givers and Christmas creatures, like the Yule Cat who will attack you if you're not wearing new clothes on Christmas (is this where the socks and underwear gifts come from), the downright creepy Yule Lads with their cringe names like "pot-licker," Frau Perchta who opens up the stomachs of naughty children and stuffs rocks or straw inside them, or more.

Very detailed, but absolutely fascinating, with a detailed bibliography.
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Comfort Read #1

Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift, Kathryn Lasky

This is the only one of my comfort Christmas reads that I didn't read first as a child. This book came out in 2001, as part of the "Dear America" series. I picked it up because (a) my parents lived through and told me about the Great Depression and (b) it was written by Kathryn Lasky, whose Callista Jacobs mysteries I already liked (also her young adult book Prank).

The book is set in 1932, during which the Depression is already affecting the middle-class Swift family: Sam and Belle and their four daughters Clementine, Gwendolyn, Adelaide (Lady), and our protagonist, 11-year-old Minnie, and one son, Ozzie, a precocious 9-year-old who's a science nerd. As the book opens, the daughter of one of Belle's cousins, Willie Faye Darling, who's grown up in the Dust Bowl, is shipped to live with them because her parents are dead. The story follows the family's adjustments, as well as Willie Faye's, and the worsening conditions of the Depression on them all, especially after Sam Swift loses his job as an accountant.

Minnie is a fun narrator. She's opinionated and very independent, an admirer of Amelia Earhart, and a lover of writing. Willie Faye is also a fascinating character: brought up in Texas during the terrible droughts, she is undersized, but with an understanding far beyond her years. Probably the most fun character is Lady, the offbeat, clothes-loving sixteen year old who can do just about anything with fashion, including almost literally "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Based on author Lasky's aunts and uncle, the characters crackle to life under Minnie's pen. The only sour note is the traditional epilogue (all "Dear America" books had them, telling what happened to the protagonists as adults), which, I thought, went a little overboard in suddenly making the Swifts "fabulously wealthy." I would have settled for them just living a normal, middle-class life.

Inept Detective Vs. Mysterious Small Town

Murder at Holly House, Denzil Meyrick

Everyone seems to have loved this book; I see it on bestseller lists. I bought it because, well, hey, period murder mystery (1952) in England, in a country house. Even the protagonist, a slightly inept police inspector (Frank Grasby) seemed intriguing. Plus it took place at Christmas. In Yorkshire.

Sorry, I was less than enchanted. After awhile, Frank's ineptness just got tiring, Christmas wasn't acknowledged much at all, and Our Hero just got into more and more absurd situations. The mystery is overshadowed by another sinister thing going on in the village.

The female protagonist turns out to be too good to be true, but deathly dull at the same time, and, after reading it, I don't remember many of the supporting characters. By the last half I just wanted to know if they caught the bad guys and who the dude stuffed up the chimney was—an anticlimactic revelation, incidentally—and get it over with.

I doubt if I would have ever read another Frank Grasby mystery. Sadly, the author passed away just as this was published. I'm sad to hear that, but not about not being tempted to read another story about the character.
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The Final Volume and One of the Best

A Wiltshire Christmas, compiled by John Chandler

I found the first one of these Sutton Christmas anthologies (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale several years back, and another at a library sale a couple of years later. Since then I've been collecting and reading them all; they contain short excerpts of Christmas/Christmastide passages from various British novels, memoirs, and poetry books, with the action taking place in the shire or historical era denoted in the title.

This is the final volume of the regional ones I've collected, and happily, it's one of my favorites. Several of the volumes seemed to just repeat the same old "George and the Dragon" mummers play over and over, and the entries were blah. This one contains a variety of memories from various decades, including the story of evacuees from London during World War II, accounts of a devastating pre-Christmas storm in 1859 and flooding in January of 1915, Christmas carols unique to the region, an odd version of "George and the Dragon" with a Duke and Duchess and a Captain Curly, an account of mummers and another of waits, and even the sweet story "Mog" about a little boy who wants a cat for Christmas, but his dad is dead set against it...until...

So. I'm done! I have the whole set!

Second Sunday of Advent

Amor (Love)

 

 

 

Advent
Thomas Merton 

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect! Fly, vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent,
holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets’ stately setting,
Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!

Will Elk Ridge Lose Its Magic?

A Spell for Midwinter's Heart, Morgan Lockhart
Thank goodness! A romantic novel with adults who act like adults!

Years earlier, Rowan Midwinter desperately wanted to save her grandmother's home from developers. Her hometown, Elk Ridge in the Rockies, is a haven for many magic users who follow pagan traditions, and she was to help cast a spell to save it. She failed and quit using magic that day. She won't even use it to help persuade people to invest into a worthy solar power franchise. But she promised her mother to come home for Yule; on her path home, she re-encounters her old school rival Gaven McCreery, whose father is now hell-bent on selling out the whole town of Elk Ridge to some big city developers. And it may happen, because Elk Ridge makes its biggest money at their winter festival at Yule—and this year's may be a bust because there's no snow.

The two storylines develop in parallel: Rowan and Gavin's rediscovery of each other as well as Rowan and her friends and family trying to keep the specter, of cookie-cutter commercial development from taking over Elk Ridge and its unique inhabitants. Rowan must come to terms with what she saw as her initial failure that just let her into a downward spiral in which she sees failure as her only future, and learn to love herself as Gavin also begins to love her, and she him.

This book includes a great supporting cast, including Rowan's brother, mother, and father, and her best friend, Zaide, and Zaide's lover Naomie. I really enjoyed this one!