Category: Memes

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The optional theme this month is Your Favourite Genre. I’ve chosen books combining two of my favourite genres historical fiction and crime fiction into Historical Crime Fiction.

The links in the titles of each book are to my own posts.

O is for Once Upon a River by Dianne Setterfield

An intriguing and mystifying book that entranced me from the beginning to the end. The story has a timeless feel to it but it is set somewhere towards the end of the nineteenth century. It’s a mystery beginning in the Swan Inn at Radcot, an ancient inn, well-known for its storytelling, on the banks of the Thames. A badly injured stranger enters carrying the drowned corpse of a little girl. It’s mystifying as hours later the dead child, miraculously it seems, takes a breath, and returns to life. The mystery is enhanced by folklore, by science that appears to be magic, and by romance and superstition.

C is for Catching the Eagle by Karen Charlton

Set in Northumberland in 1809, this book is based on a true story –  that of Karen Charlton’s husband’s ancestors. Kirkley Hall manor house is mysteriously burgled. When suspicion falls on Jamie Charlton, he and his family face a desperate battle to save him from the gallows. Stephen Lavender, the detective employed by  Nathaniel Ogle, the owner of Kirkley Hall was also a real historical figure, a detective, who later became the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester after the formation of the police force by Sir Robert Peel. This is the type of historical fiction that I like. The characters come across as real people, with real problems in a real time and place (Northumberland 1809 – 1811). 

T is for Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh. This is a novella, written in the first person and set in May 1593. It’s a tense, dramatic story of the last days of Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet and spy. Accused of heresy and atheism, his death is a mystery, although conjecture and rumours abound. It conveys the claustrophobic atmosphere of danger surrounding Marlowe; who can he trust, and who is behind the pseudonym of ‘Tamburlaine’, who posted a libellous handbill referencing Marlowe’s plays? In such a brief book Louise Welsh has managed to convey the political and the seedy underworld of the Elizabethan period, the dishonesty and love of intrigue, the dangers of the plague and the threat of war. 

O is for Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth. It’s set in 1889 – 1890, fin-de-siècle London and Paris and the mystery begins with Oscar Wilde finding the naked body of Billy Wood, a 16 year old boy in the candle-lit room in a small terraced house in Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament. Billy’s throat has been cut and he is laid out as though on a funeral bier, surrounded by candles, with the smell of incense still in the air. It’s a combination of fiction and fact, with both real and imaginary characters. Wilde with the help of his friends Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Sherard sets out to solve the crime.

B is for The Body in the Ice by A J MacKenzie. It’s the 2nd Hardcastle and Chaytor Mystery set in Romney Marsh and the surrounding countryside in 1796-7. This is the period after the end of the American War of Independence, so Britain and America are at peace, but Britain and revolutionary France are at war with the constant threat of a French invasion. That winter was exceptionally harsh and cold and on Christmas Day in the village of St Mary in the Marsh, on the Kent coast Amelia Chaytor is spending the day with her friends, spinsters Miss Godfrey and Miss Roper when their maidservant bursts in and announces that she has seen someone at New Hall stables, frozen into the ice face down. Previously two men had been seen arriving at the Hall and at first it looks as though one of them has killed the other as they have both disappeared.

E is for An Expert in Murder, a very detailed and intricate murder mystery by Nicola Upson. She has a passion for the theatre and it shines through to great advantage in this book, set in the theatrical world of  the 1930s – March, 1934 to be precise, as the final week of Josephine Tey’s play Richard of Bordeaux begins. Josephine is travelling from her home in Inverness to London by steam train when she meets an enthusiastic fan, Elspeth Simmons, who boarded the train at Berwick-upon-Tweed. They arrive in London, but then Elspeth is murdered and soon afterwards Bernard Aubrey, the theatre owner is also found dead, poisoned. Detective Inspector Archie Primrose, a friend of Josephine’s investigates. It’s a blend of fact and fiction.

R is for A Rustle of Silk by Alys Clare, first in a series featuring Dr Gabriel Taverner, set in the early years of 17th century England. It begins in April 1603 when former ship’s surgeon Gabriel Taverner has settled in Devon near his family and he is trying to set up a new practice as a physician. The local coroner, Theophilus Davey asks him to examine a partially decomposed body found beside the river. At first it looks as though it was suicide, but on realising that it’s his brother-in-law, Jeromy, Gabriel and Theophilus are convinced that he was murdered.

The next link up will be on November 2, 2024 when the theme will be: Food or Autumn Decorations on the Cover

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The optional theme this month, which is Back to School. I’ve chosen books featuring students, teachers and governesses. I found it very difficult – especially with three Es to find.

The links in the titles of each book go to Amazon UK and the descriptions are from my own posts or Amazon UK, Goodreads, or LibraryThing.

S is for South Riding by Winifred Holtby, a wonderful book, portraying life in the 1930s, this is an intensely detailed story, involving many sub-plots as the lives of all the characters unfold. One of the main characters is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of Kiplington High School for Girls, a fiercely passionate and dedicated teacher.

E is for Engleby by Sebastian Faulks (one of my TBRs).

Welcome to Mike Engleby’s world. Deep in the hallowed halls of an esteemed English university, Mike is one of the only working-class boys, amongst the privileged masses. He’s also different, starkly so, but able to observe it all. But observation soon tips into obsession when his fixation, fellow student Jennifer, goes missing. What has Mike Engleby overlooked?

A cult classic and an exemplar of the campus novel, Engleby is a beguiling portrait of an outsider, told in an unforgettable voice.

P is for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is set in 1936 in Edinburgh in the Marcia Blaine school, where schoolteacher Miss Brodie has groomed a group of young girls, known as the Brodie Set, to be the ‘creme de la creme‘. Marcia Blaine school is a traditional school where Miss Brodie’s ideas and methods of teaching are viewed with dislike and distrust. The Head Teacher is looking for ways to discredit and get rid of her. I enjoyed both the book and the film with Maggie Smith in the title role. The story is told in flashbacks from 1930 –1939 and quite early on in the book we are told who ‘betrayed’ Miss Brodie.

T is for The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

This is the story of two children and their governess. She has been employed by their uncle who wants nothing to do with them. Their previous governess had died under mysterious circumstances (was it in childbirth?).  The older child, Miles, was away at school and soon after the new governess arrives Miles returns home, expelled from school for some terrible unexplained offence.

E is for Educated by Tara Westover, a memoir, which I haven’t read.

Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate until she was nine years old.

At sixteen, to escape her father’s radicalism and a violent older brother, Tara left home. What followed was a struggle for self-invention, a journey that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

M is for Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Miss Pym had been a French teacher at a girls’ High School until she inherited some money, left teaching and wrote a best-selling psychology book. She was invited to Leys Physical Training College to give a lecture on psychology. by her old school friend, Henrietta Hodge, the college Principal. She stayed there for a few days, that extended into two weeks as she got to know and like the students and the staff. But then there was a’nasty accident‘.

B is for Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

E is for Emma by Jane Austen. I read this book many years ago, so I haven’t reviewed it. It’s another book featuring a governess. The book begins as Anna Taylor, who had been Emma’s governess for sixteen years leaves Hartfield when she marries Mr Weston. They had become friends, and even like sisters and Emma misses her. Nothing, however, delights Emma more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.

R is for The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean. Alexander Seaton is a schoolteacher in Banff. It’s set in 17th century Scotland, mainly in the town of Banff, where on a stormy night Patrick Davidson, the local apothecary’s assistant collapses in the street. The next morning he is found dead in the school house of Alexander Seaton, a failed minister, now a schoolteacher.

The next link up will be on October 5, 2024 when the theme will be: Your Favorite Genre