Children's lit, assorted

I have spent the afternoon attempting to extract a large amount of clematis from a rose bush, a process which involved acquiring a lot of scratches as well as snagging myself on the rose bush at frequent intervals. I am also now wondering if I'm allowed to put the clematis in the recycling bin as it is an official Noxious Weed, but I'll deal with that later. Fortunately my book backlog is less problematic.

I have some longer reviews I want to get on to, so this will be relatively brief.

( Noel Streatfeild, Apple Bough. )

( E.M. Channon, The Honour of the House. Re-read. )

( Elinor Lyon, The house in hiding. )

( Phillis Garrard, Hilda at school, The doings of Hilda, Hilda’s adventures. )

( Doreen Swinburne, Jean’s new junior. )

( Constance White, Girls in Flight. )

( Pamela Rushby, Circles of Stone. )

Assorted adults

I saw George Bernard Shaw's play Heartbreak House the other night, a good production of a play that I didn't love, but liked a lot and which had a number of bits that snag in the memory. It has a lot of interesting points to make about power, as it plays out in British society, and a neat tendency to avoid (or invert) the obvious conclusion. It was written before WWI, a conflict Shaw adamantly opposed, and the ending is tragic-comic and apocalyptic all at once.

Anyway. These three books are also British, also interesting, and also, as with Heartbreak House, indelibly marked by WWI, but I don't think any of them will linger the same way as the play did - they're smoother, somehow, and my attention slides off them.

( A.S. Byatt, The children’s book. )

( R.F. Delderfield, To serve them all my days. )

( Pamela Frankau, Slaves of the lamp. )

Motherland, Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, 4/50

Cross-posted to 50books_poc

Maya used to go back to India every year; she was born there, and raised by her grandmother until she was four, when her parents took her back with them to New York. But she's now 15, with commitments to her American school, friends, and unsuitable boyfriend, and this extended holiday is forced on her by her parents as a way of cutting at least some of these ties. Initially reluctant, Maya gradually settles back into her life in India; but things here have changed as well, even if they initially look the same.

I liked this - it's a nice, slow story, with a lot of acute observation (including many great descriptions of food), and the careful unwinding of relationships within Maya's extended family is fascinating, with all the characters vivid and credible. Maya feels like a real teenager, and one with varying commitments and strengths from both her Indian and American upbringings; she's at home with some things and confused by others, whether language or social custom or political opinion. She is privileged, and self-centred, but she does try to do something about the latter, and again it feels appropriate for a 15 year old, and the other characters have their own blindspots. The novel's only weak point is the subplot involving the Tamil Tigers (the story's set just after Rajiv Ghandi's assassination) as while things like the interview at Customs work as background, subsequent developments don't feel organic to the text, with an odd lack of emotional reaction or foreseeable consequences. What works in the story is how Maya perceives herself and others, though, and how it changes over time.

It doesn't look as though she's published anything else yet, unfortunately.