It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we are starting with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. I read a lot of Judy Blume books in my childhood/early teens and this is one I particularly remember – not every detail of the plot, but certain scenes and lines. Here’s the blurb:

Life isn’t easy for Margaret. She’s moved away from her childhood home, she’s starting a new school, finding new friends – and she’s convinced she’s not normal. For a start she hasn’t got a clue whether she wants to be Jewish like her father or Christian like her mother. Everyone else seems really sure of who they are. And, worst of all, she’s a ‘late developer’. She just knows that all her friends are going to need a bra before she does. It’s too embarrassing to talk to her parents about these things. So she talks to God instead – and waits for an answer…

For my first link I have chosen another novel with a question as the title: Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart (1). Of all of the Stewart suspense novels I’ve read, I think this one and Nine Coaches Waiting are two of the best. Published in 1955, this was her first novel and features some beautiful descriptions of the French countryside where our heroine, Charity, is trying to protect a thirteen-year-old boy whose father has been acquitted of murder.

In Madam, Will You Talk? the characters visit the Château d’If, made famous as the fortress off the coast of Marseille where Edmond Dantes is unjustly imprisoned near the beginning of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (2). If I was forced to choose my absolute favourite classic novel, this would probably be it. At nearly 1,000 pages it has an incredibly complex plot, but it can be described quite simply as a tale of revenge. This leads me to..

Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes (3), the second in his series of novels featuring Inspector John Appleby. This Golden Age mystery from 1937 is set in an English country house where a guest is murdered during an amateur performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was the first of the Appleby novels I read and I enjoyed it so much I have since read another seven of them, although with more mixed results.

Another book in which the characters are staging a production of a Shakespeare play is Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (4). The play in this case is The Tempest and the novel follows Felix Phillips as he helps a group of prisoners to study the play and improve their literacy. I really enjoyed this book – it has so many different layers and even includes an element of revenge, so has a double link to book 3 in my chain!

Phillip Tempest is the name of the villain in Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase (5). Having only been familiar with Alcott as the author of Little Women and its sequels, I remember being very surprised to discover that she had written a book like this which has much more in common with the Victorian sensation novels of authors like Wilkie Collins than it does with Little Women!

To finish my chain, I’m linking to another book with a title beginning ‘A Long’ – A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (6). I don’t think I’m ever going to be a fan of Allende’s writing; I have tried two of her books and didn’t love either of them, but they always sound interesting and I might be tempted to give her one more chance. A Long Petal of the Sea is set in Spain during the Civil War and then in Chile in the decades that follow.

~

And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included titles that are questions, the Château d’If, tales of revenge, Shakespeare’s plays, tempests and titles beginning with ‘A Long’.

In January we are starting with Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month is slightly different as we’ve been given the freedom of starting with any book with which we ended a previous chain. As I’ve been taking part in Six Degrees of Separation most months for nearly three years, I had plenty of options but decided to choose the book that ended my chain this time last year, in November 2019. That book was Uprooted by Naomi Novik, a fantasy novel set in a world closely resembling sixteenth century Poland. Our narrator, Agnieszka, lives in a village on the edge of a dark, forbidden forest until her seventeeth birthday when she is selected by a great wizard known as the Dragon who takes her away with him to his tower.

Thinking of the name of the wizard in Uprooted leads me to a book with the word ‘Dragon’ in the title: Named of the Dragon by Susanna Kearsley (1). This is not one of my favourite Kearsley novels, but I did enjoy it. It’s set in modern day Wales but steeped in Arthurian myths and legends.

Staying with those myths and legends, my next link is to Mary Stewart’s series of Arthurian novels which begins with The Crystal Cave (2). The title refers to a magical, crystal-filled cave near Merlin’s home in Wales where Merlin retreats on several occasions throughout the series to receive visions and revelations.

Another novel in which some of the characters live in caves is The Moon Sister by Lucinda Riley (3). This is the fifth book in Riley’s Seven Sisters series and is set in both present day Scotland and in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. There are some wonderful descriptions of the caves of Sacromonte, the traditional home of the Spanish gitano community.

That Lady by Kate O’Brien (4) is also set in Spain, but in a much earlier period. Beginning in 1576, it tells the story of Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, and her relationship with King Philip II. As you can see from the portrait on the book cover, Ana wore an eye patch which, according to the novel, was because she lost an eye fighting a duel.

Someone else who lived in the same century as Ana and also wore a patch after losing an eye was Francis Bryan, the subject of a non-fiction book by Sarah Beth-Watkins which I read earlier in the year. Sir Francis Bryan: Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Ambassador (5) gives a short and factual account of Bryan’s life at the Tudor court. Bryan was nicknamed ‘the Vicar of Hell’ and this takes me to the final book in my chain.

Jamaica Inn (6), Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel of smugglers and shipwrecks on the Cornish coast also features a ‘vicar’ whose name is Francis: Francis Davey, the Vicar of Altarnun. I first read Jamaica Inn many years ago, immediately after reading Rebecca, and found it disappointing in comparison; I read it again more recently and really enjoyed it the second time.

~

And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included dragons, Arthurian legends, cave-dwellers, Spanish history, eye patches and vicars called Francis.

In December we are starting with a book I remember from my childhood: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume.

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we are starting with a book that I have actually read – not something that happens very often! The book is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and if you haven’t read it, here is the blurb from Goodreads:

In what Henry James called a ‘trap for the unwary’, The Turn of the Screw tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely?

John Harding’s Florence and Giles (1), a Gothic novel about two children who believe their lives are in danger after the arrival of a sinister governess, is inspired by The Turn of the Screw (as you might have guessed from the very similar names of the characters: Florence and Giles, and Flora and Miles).  I loved it, although I hadn’t actually read The Turn of the Screw at the time, so didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which it was a homage to that other book.     

Another book with lots of ghostly and Gothic elements and a plot involving a governess with two young charges is This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2).  The influence of The Turn of the Screw is clear here too, although the story probably owes as much to Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins as it does to Henry James.  It was the first John Boyne novel I’ve read and still one of my favourites.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novel, Uncle Silas (3), also features a governess – an evil and villainous one called Madame de la Rougierre, who arrives at the Ruthyn family estate of Knowl to become a companion to Maud Ruthyn. A very entertaining tale of “gloomy, eerie mansions, graveyards, laudanum addiction, an evil governess, locked rooms and locked cabinets, poison and family secrets.” 

Not all governesses are as evil as Madame de la Rougierre!  Linda Martin in Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart (4) is a governess and she is the heroine of the novel. As soon as Linda arrives at the de Valmy family chateau in France to become governess to young Philippe de Valmy, she is convinced that something is wrong and the tension builds and builds until the truth is revealed. I’ve read most of Stewart’s novels and this is probably my favourite; it’s certainly the most exciting and atmospheric. 

Nine Coaches Waiting shares some plot elements with Jane Eyre, as does Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye (5).  Jane Steele herself is a fan of the Charlotte Bronte classic and becomes aware of some of the parallels between her own life and Jane Eyre’s.  After her unhappy schooldays come to an end, Jane returns to her childhood home, Highgate House, to take up a position as governess to Sahjara, the young ward of the house’s new master, Mr Thornfield.  Mystery, romance and suspense follow!

It’s not often that I am able to link the last book in one of my chains back to the first, but as soon as I saw that we were beginning this month with The Turn of the Screw I knew I would have to end with The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (6).  Not quite a governess, but a ‘live-in nanny’, our narrator Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House in Scotland to find that she is just the latest in a long string of nannies in a very short time period. Could the ghostly occurrences taking place in the house be the reason?

~

Well, that’s my chain for October. I usually try to link each book to the one before in a different way each time, but this month I’ve kept it very simple: all of the books in my chain include a governess, children and a house that is either haunted or hiding secrets of some sort.

For November’s starting point, we can use a book with which we’ve ended a previous chain and continue from there.

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we are starting with Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. I haven’t read it, but I know that it’s an alternate history imagining what might have happened if Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton.

However, I have read one of Curtis Sittenfeld’s earlier novels, Prep (1), which follows four years in the life of Lee Fiora, a teenage girl with social anxiety who attends a boarding school in Massachusetts. This seems to be a book that people either love or hate; I think whether or not you enjoy it probably depends on how strongly you can relate to the main character.

Another girl who goes to boarding school, in Canada this time, is Flavia de Luce in Alan Bradley’s As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (2). This is the seventh book in a series of mysteries starring Flavia and in this one she is investigating the disappearances of three girls at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. Not my favourite in the series, but I do love the Flavia books overall.

The title of that book comes from the lines from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Another book which also takes its inspiration from the same source is Golden Lads by Daphne du Maurier (3), a biography of two important Elizabethan figures, Francis and Anthony Bacon.

My next link is to another book with the word ‘Golden’ in the title: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (4). I found this a very entertaining novel set in 18th century New York, in those days still a small community just beginning to expand into the city we know today.

Stella Tillyard’s Call Upon the Water (5) is also set, at least partly, in the same location – but a century earlier, when the settlement was known as New Amsterdam. The rest of the novel is set in England and follows a Dutch engineer working on the draining of the marshlands in the Fens.

Finally, I’m going to link to a book written by another Stella – Stella Gibbons. Gibbons wrote many novels, as well as some short stories and poetry, but the only one I have read is her most famous one, Cold Comfort Farm (6). Because I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped to, I haven’t attempted any of her other work yet but maybe I will one day.

~

And that’s my chain for this month! My links included school stories, Cymbeline, the word ‘golden’, old New York and the name Stella. In October, we will be starting with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – finally a book that I’ve read!