fiction

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

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I’ve been rereading Eliot’s classic novel this month with Haley Larsen’s Closely Reading group on Substack. It’s been a few decades since I last read it, and different features of the book leaped out at me this time.

The story is about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Middlemarch in the English Midlands around 1830. Eliot does a masterful job of zooming in to a dozen or so characters while giving other townspeople plenty to space to make themselves known.

We first meet Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and intelligent young (19) woman, who wants to do great things in service to others, starting with better housing for the tenants of her uncle and guardian Arthur Brooke, a hilariously foolish man who can talk himself out of any opinion. Dorothea is extremely religious and denies herself pleasures, such as her mother’s jewelry, in order to sacrifice herself to a greater cause.

That turns out to be marrying Rev. Edward Casaubon, prematurely elderly at 45. A dry stick of a man, who has devoted his life to creating The Key to All Mythologies, he marries her but quickly withdraws into his shell. He rejects her romantic ideas of assisting him in his work, like Milton’s daughters taking down the blind poet’s dictation (as Dorothea dreams), mostly because he fears she will mock him when she sees how little he’s accomplished.  

We also meet Dr. Tertius Lydgate who hopes to modernise medicine In Middlemarch and the lovely, self-centered Rosamond Vincy who sets out to capture him. Her brother Fred loves Mary Garth, nurse to his uncle Mr. Featherstone, and she him. But she won’t marry Fred because he is feckless and a spendthrift, believing himself to be Featherstone’s heir and borrowing on the strength of that.

Mary’s parents Caleb and Susan Garth are kind and generous folks, Caleb being land agent for Featherstone. Then there’s Mr. Bulstrode, a wealthy banker. He’s a pious if hypocritical Methodist who runs much of the town and would like to do more to impose his beliefs on other residents.

A lot of characters—and there are more! However, Eliot wrangles their stories into a coherent story where we touch each person often enough that it’s not hard to keep them straight.

What stood out to me on this reading is the theme of what it means to live a good life. By that I mean a life of integrity, one we can be satisfied with when we lie on our deathbeds. In Middlemarch we have all these lives, all of these people intending to do the right thing yet derailed by temptations and compromises and the pressures of daily life. As we follow each storyline, we get to see various permutations of what a good life might look like—or not.

One aspect of a good life is being a contributing member of society, one which among other things means getting involved in politics. We hear a good bit about the Reform Bill (later the Reform Act of 1832) expanding the franchise to a larger segment of the male population, and about the coming of the railroads that threatens local farmers. There’s an interesting parallel here between the politics of the period and Eliot’s method of concentrating on a few privileged characters while including others to a lesser extent but with equal respect.

Another aspect is our personal relationships. I am fascinated by Eliot’s idea of a “home epic” which is what she calls this novel. She defines a home epic as a story about what happens after the wedding, particularly during the course of a marriage. I am often frustrated by stories that end with a wedding, as though that’s the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, so I love that she takes marriage as  the starting point instead. I’d expand the definition of Eliot’s term to include domestic stories, stories within a family, not just the married couple. And by family, I mean families of choice too. A home epic might also cover the course of a life and how we interact with others, how we live within communities.

The greatest barrier to a good relationship, whether with a spouse or a neighbour, is embodied in her subtitle “A Study of Provincial Life.” Yes, the town is geographically provincial, but there is a larger meaning to the word. As Rebecca Mead puts it in My Life in Middlemarch, “It is also concerned with the emotional repercussions of a kind of immature provincialism of the soul—a small-minded, self-centered perspective that resists the implications of a larger view.”

Over and over again, we see characters misunderstanding each other. So many conversations where people misread each other’s intentions or fail to comprehend what the other is thinking! We know this because of Eliot’s psychological insights, and her technique of using a narrator to go into each character’s thoughts. Her narrator also pulls out to give us that larger view, sometimes warning us that a character may not be as bad as they appear. The narrator can occasionally seem intrusive but is vital to Eliot’s ability to weave the story together and bring out her theme.

Therefore, to live a good life we must be able to empathise with others. We have to work to actually see things the way someone else does, to set aside our own view of the world and understand theirs. I think this is why our narrator persists in explaining these characters to us. Eliot keeps coming back to the idea that we have to grow out of our natural self-centeredness and recognise that others see the world differently.

It’s not easy. As Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Yet we can try.

What does it mean to you to live a good life?

The Lost Words, by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris

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When the Oxford Junior Dictionary was updated, it was found that around forty common words had been dropped—all of them words to do with nature—and their place taken by words, many of which have to do with the online world.

In response, MacFarlane and Morris came together to create what they call a spell book to help young readers rediscover the natural world. Unless we experience and learn to love the world of nature around us, we will not work to save it.

In this large-format book, we first see the creature or plant’s environment empty of everything but a scattering of letters. Some of the letters are a different color and spell out what is missing. Then comes the illustrated spell—an acrostic celebrating and summoning the creature or plant—followed by a stunning double-page illustration of it restored to its habitat.

This is the most beautiful book I’ve seen in a long, long while. Jackie Morris’s illustrations are simply stunning. I’ve even propped it open on my grandmother’s rocking chair so I can glance over at it frequently.

Robert MacFarlane’s spells—acrostic poems—summon the lost creature or plant through the music of words, using imagery, alliteration, internal rhyme, personification, and other poetic devices, including Anglo-Saxon kenning. A few excerpts:

“Hold a heartful of heather, never let it wither, / Even as you travel far from crag and river.”

“Kingfisher: the colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river’s quiver. / Ink-black bill, orange throat and a quick blue back-gleaming feather-stream.”

When I read this book to the littles in my life, they were surprised that anyone would think children wouldn’t know—or wouldn’t need to know—these words. The young ones talked eagerly of the bramble berries in their yard and the otters and herons they’ve seen. They wondered how children in even the most urban environments would not be familiar with dandelions. One of the littles is even named Willow, so was indignant that their name would be discarded.

The only one new to them was conker, since in the U.S. that word is not used for the seed of the horse chestnut, something they do know well since they love collecting the seeds from a horse chestnut near us. As far as I know, the children’s game using conkers is not played here in the U.S. My littles were interested in the description, but not eager to try it.

The book has won many awards and moved out into the world in various formats. I applaud its mission of connecting young people to our natural world and in the process helping to save that disappearing habitat. Most importantly it is a feast for the eyes and, when read aloud as it begs to be, for the ears as well. May its spells work.

What children’s picture book have you loved for the illustrations as well as the words?

Jigsaw puzzles available from the book’s website.

The Child from the Sea, by Elizabeth Goudge

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Little is known of Lucy Walter whose son James was the oldest child of King Charles II. From those few facts, Goudge has spun an entrancing story of a vibrant girl whose great love for the prince—whose father ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as King Charles I—lasted a lifetime. We first meet Lucy as a child in Wales, where she lived with her family in Roch Castle and thought herself part buccaneer, roaming the countryside experiencing all of creation with a dazzling joy.

It was then she became aware of the birds. They were coming down from the sky like drifting autumn leaves, martins, chaffinches, goldfinches and linnets, finding their way to the bracken-sheltered hollows and the warm dry hedges and the safe crannies of the rocks. Lucy had watched the bird migrations before but she had never seen one halted like this, halted as the warning sounded along the shore.

She stood still, scarcely breathing, her arms out and her face turned up to the darkening sky, and they had no fear of her. A wing brushed her cheek and just for a moment some tired little being alighted on her hand, putting on one finger for ever the memory of a tiny claw that clung like a wedding ring. It was for her a moment of ecstasy, of marriage with all living creatures, of unity with life itself, and she whispered in Welsh, ‘Dear God, this happiness is too great for me!’

In London she glimpses the young prince from a bridge over the Thames, and they seem to have even in that brief moment a special connection, one that grows naturally over the years as they encounter each other, until they finally discover the wonder of first love. Though lost in their mutual fervor, Lucy insists on marriage first which, in this historical fiction, was performed by her beloved local parson before the marriage was consummated. It had to be kept secret because the political situation had become fraught.

However, this book is so much more than a love story. Charles’s father, Charles I, was under attack for his belief in the divine right of kings. He argued with Parliament by illegally levying taxes without their consent and alienated others during this time of religious disputes by marrying a Catholic and trying to enforce high-church Anglican practices. Charles I was successor to his father James I both of whom I encountered recently in Phillipa Gregory’s Earthly Joys.

The reader stays with Lucy as she tries to navigate these tumultuous times of civil unrest and debates over the power of the king and Parliament while staying true to her own Prince Charles. As we move between revolution and exile and betrayals, Lucy’s story illuminates themes of forgiveness, loyalty and enduring love. Given our own fraught times, her story is a welcome reminder of these virtues. They may not protect us from harm, but we can stay true to ourselves.

This final book from the beloved author of adult and children’s books abounds in such hard-won wisdom. I read it when it first came out in 1970 and at the time was absorbed in the romance of these two young people and of the Stuart kings about whom I’d read so much.

On this reading, though, I was looking for and found insight from Goudge, who was 70 at the time and had lived through both World Wars and the great changes and horrors of the Twentieth Century, as recounted in her memoir The Joy of the Snow. For example, the description of Elenor Gwinne, Lucy’s grandmother, the peace she had attained and how, struck me as a genuine example of wisdom one might come to in the course of a long life.

The other advantage of this late-in-life novel is that Goudge is writing in the fullness of her powers, as shown in the richness of the story, the interweaving of fact and fiction into a story that keeps the reader enchanted from first page to the last. We move from place to place but each one comes to life because we encounter them through Lucy’s eyes.

I was especially taken by the way Goudge uses description to evoke a response, everything from the smallest image to passages that capture your heart. A particularly thoughtful image is spoken by one of Charles’s friends: “ ‘ . . . loyalty is one of the most difficult of virtues, a flower with all its petals pointing in different directions.’ ” And a passage that thrilled me is:

The birds sang for joy of the growing light, and when Lucy opened her window to hear them, the air smelt of violets, though as yet she had found none under the dead leaves in the unicorn wood. But she found minute buttons of coral buds on the brambles and the green of dog’s mercury among the leaves, and when she left the wood and looked back from the far end of the field, she saw how the trees in the silvery sunshine were clothing themselves in pale amethyst and paler coral, in faint crimson and dun gold, one colour fading into the other as the colours do on the iridescent breast of a bird. 

Lucy never loses her thrilling response to the world, whether it’s a sailing vessel or a homely fire. She is no saint but is constantly reminded—and reminds us—that there are good people in the world and that even in the midst of danger we can keep a loving heart.

What historical fiction or nonfiction have you read that gives you courage in our dark times?

A Piece of Justice, by Jill Paton Walsh

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Imogen Quy is a nurse at St. Agatha’s College in Cambridge University. Working part-time gives her the freedom to enjoy other activities like quilting, which is where the story begins. She and two friends must choose a pattern and fabric for a quilt that will eventually be raffled off for the Red Cross funds. This seemingly unimportant activity foreshadows what’s coming in this smart mystery.

The three have different ideas for a quilt pattern: one wants something simple and basic while another wants an elaborate pattern with lots of curves. Imogen likes patterns that are more complex: “one block merged with the next, so that the pattern shifted as you looked, part of one block completing squares or diamonds in the next.” So right in the first paragraph we know what sort of story we’ve landed in.

This sense of unease and shifting ground is reinforced on the next page: Imogen always starts out with fabric with  a “tasteful” pattern and “soft harmonising colors,” yet once she puts them together, she finds them boring. When her friend Patsy combines the most unlikely colors and patterns—orange fabric “printed in scarlet blotches” next to a bright turquoise—Imogen finds it unexpected and perfect.

As an independent woman, Imogen supplements her income by renting out her two spare bedrooms—currently to two undergraduate men—and her upstairs flat—now to Fran, a postgraduate student at St. Agatha’s. Fran has a problem: she needs to earn money for her living expenses, so she’s thrilled when the new chair of her department, Professor Maverack, offers her a job.

It’s a new department: Biography. In what seems an aside but is more foreshadowing, a brief conversation among dons gives us a history of biography going back to Plutarch. Their back-and-forth is enlivened by the theories of what is important in a life and how these theories have changed over time.

When Fran meets with Maverack, he tells her he’s been hired to write the biography of a recently deceased Cambridge don, Gideon Summerfield. Maverack doesn’t have time—he’s too busy with his own research–so he proposes that he pay Fran to be his ghost writer. Since the relationship between biography and autobiography is the subject of her dissertation, the job will also give her some good experience.

And the job should be easy because the person previously hired to write the book has already completed the research. When Imogen asks why Mark Zephyr didn’t finish the job, Fran breezily replies, “ ‘He died.’ ”  

When that research is delivered, the giant carton disintegrates “String snapped, corrugated cardboard tore open, and bundles and sheets of paper thumped and fluttered everywhere.” What a description! In it I can feel Agatha’s horror and dismay, knowing how hard it will be to restore any kind of order to the precious papers. As she and Fran find after much sorting, the disorder was there even before the box fell apart: different kinds of handwriting, seeming cross-references that don’t make sense, postcards with mysterious numbers on them.

When she finally creates a timeline, Fran finds that there is one summer that is not accounted for. Then Summerfield’s wife, the person who commissioned the biography, comes banging on Imogen’s door demanding that the papers be returned to her.

Such dramatic scenes punctuate this quiet mystery which also abounds in what Donald Maass calls microtension, described as “the line-by-line effect of creating uneasiness in the reader, which can only be relieved by reading the next thing on the page.” For example, Imogen pauses under a cherry tree on “a fine, crisp autumn day” when it is “just warm enough to sit for a few moments on a damp bench and relish the day.” All lovely, but there’s that damp bench.

Large and small moments like these create suspense that keeps the pages flying by. The shifting patterns of the plot also had my mind ticking over even when I tried to set the book aside for a while. I’m not into quilting these days, but Imogen is someone I’d love to sit down and work a cryptic crossword with. I like the way her mind works, sort of a modern Miss Marple. I’ll be looking for more books in this series.

What do you look for in a mystery—or in a quilt?

The Incredible Crime, by Lois Austen-Leigh

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This has been my month for virtual travel: from a remote Finnish island to southern Virginia to Tuscany and London. Now this recently republished novel from 1931 takes me to East Anglia, a part of England I love, where we move between Cambridge and a manor in Suffolk.

Prudence Pinsent, a thoroughly modern woman in her thirties, lives with her father, the Master of (fictional) Prince’s College and a retired bishop. In her role as his hostess she’s perfectly proper but “she reserved to herself the right to swear like a trooper when she chose.” She attributes her independent spirit and unconventional behavior to “a far-back buccaneering ancestor.”

We meet her at a bridge party throwing a crime novel across the room in disgust. The conversation with her three friends, Cambridge wives, quickly turns from a discussion of novels and Cambridge gossip to a new and untraceable poison acquired by one of the odder professors. Then the professor husband of one of the wives enters: “About  the last thing in the world that Skipwith looked like was what he was, an eminent scientific professor. He was not only washed, he was even shaved.”

 A few days later she heads out to visit her beloved cousin at his home Wellende Old Hall, a (fictional) isolated manor among the marshes and canals of Suffolk, that has its own ghost. The description of the autumn drive, passing Ely Cathedral, the Devil’s Dyke, and Bury St. Edmunds, invites the reader in.

Already the academic feeling of the University was beginning to fade, and the feeling of the country-side, of long furrows made by the plough, of thickets scratching in a stubble field, of tired cart-horses going home o’ nights, was beginning to supersede it—the beech woods were all turned to a russet brown, mingling with the soft tints of the ploughed fields and the hedgerows.

As she approaches Wellende, the startling white of gulls against the soft brown fields and then the cold, grey North Sea call up the atmosphere of the fens with their secret streams and ghosts and history of smuggling.

The plot spins out around smuggling, spies, and drugs seasoned with academic satire, country house mayhem, and modern romance. Also, hunting, so be warned.

In Kristen R. Saxton’s introduction, she points out that, “Just as The Incredible Crime combines conventions from the traditions of village and college mysteries, it also offers a sparkly union of the Jane Austen novel of manners with the mystery genre.”

Lois Austen-Leigh is said to have written her novels at the very desk used by her great-great aunt, Jane Austen, later donated to the British Library by Lois’s niece. Lois wrote four crime novels during the Golden Age of British mystery, the period between WW1 and WW11. Her uncle, Augustus Austen-Leigh, was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, hence her understanding of University doings. She did war-work in both wars and was friends with people like Benjamin Britten and M.R. James. All this makes me curious about her life, and I’m looking now for a biography of her.

The intriguing cover design is based on a British Rail poster from the 1920s, reproduced on the back cover. I learned about this novel and many more set in Cambridge from a post by Anne Kennedy Smith on Substack.

Although the plot is a bit thin in this period piece, the atmosphere and setting are delightful. I found the story great fun and a welcome step back into a different time and place.

What is your favorite Golden Age mystery?

Still Life, by Sarah Winman

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Tuscany, August, 1944. Taking a walk after lunch, Evelyn Skinner sees a jeep and waves it down. As an art historian with decades of experience, she’s in Italy to help with the artworks from museums and churches that have been hidden in the hills during the war, identifying them and assessing the damage. She asks the young English soldier driving the jeep, Private Ulysses Temper, to help her contact the Allied Military Government.

Even in this brief scene, these two people capture the imagination, while Tuscany itself seizes the senses. Ulysses is on his way to pick up Captain Darnley, who has opened his eyes to glories of Italy and art and literature, and takes Evelyn along. Then we jump to London where we meet Ulysses’s wife Peg, Col who runs the bar where she sings, Cress who converses with a tree, the parrot Claude who lives in the bar and quotes Shakespeare, and others. From that point on the novel alternates between London and Florence.

I picked up this book wanting to spend some time in Italy in the middle of the twentieth century. The description are luscious, but the true beauty of the book comes from showing how the fragile threads we throw out to each can, over time, become a beloved community and a motley group of eccentrics can become a family.

There’s never any confusion with the wide cast of characters spread between the two cities. Each person vibrates with life, their adventures by turns dangerous, hilarious and poignant. We meet them as they gather in the sort of places we’ve started to call the commons: a pub, a café, a plaza. We follow them over the decades as they, and we, begin to see how these relationships that began so casually have become a web that can support them during the worst times.

Some people in my book club were bothered by the many unlikely coincidences, but most of us enjoyed the fairy tale quality of the story. We also appreciated the subtle use of symbols and the way different kinds of arts were folded into the story: music, paintings, sculpture, poetry, literature. The descriptions of places and people seduced me, and the dialogue is some of the best I’ve read.

However, the decision to present dialogue without quotation marks poses a problem. It’s a cool, modern thing to do, but this fiction is set in the past. Worse, I often couldn’t tell what was dialogue and what was narrative. Some stories manage to make this clear without the punctuation, but not this one. Most of the people in my book club had trouble getting into the book; they started and stopped, tempted to give up, or they had to reread parts near the beginning a few times before taking the plunge. They thought the lack of quotation marks played a part in their confusion.

Writers often struggle with beginnings and endings. In some of my reviews, you’ll find a complaint about an ending that seems too abrupt or that ties things up too neatly. Here, I found the opposite problem: the last section should have been cut. Unfortunately it leaves behind the rich cast of characters we’ve come to love in order to follow a single one, and introduces a slew of new characters here at the end of the book. The section is well-written, but unnecessary to the story. It felt like padding. I was disappointed, too, that it took some wonderfully evocative allusions from earlier in the book and ran them into the ground, just in case we didn’t get them. 

Yet even with these concerns, I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a novel as much as this one.  Each time I picked it up, I felt as though I were sinking into a rich, delicious dream. What a wonderful, luxurious summer read!

What novel set in Tuscany have you enjoyed?

Gemma Sommerset, by Jill McCroskey Coupe

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The story opens at a summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains where fourteen-year-old  Gemma undergoes a transformative experience. In 1957 girls’ roles were strictly defined, especially in the South, but away from home and facing a surprising danger, she finds a new sense of herself. The problem then becomes what to do with that when she returns home.

Gemma is part of an in-between age group: too late to be part of the WWII generation and too soon for the Sixties with its peace-and-love. This new novel from Jill Coupe explores how throughout her life she balances her desire for adventure and accomplishment with society’s restraints and expectations.

She dreams of studying French in Paris but ends up in a traditional marriage, home with a baby while her husband continues up his professional path. I’m reminded of Philip Larkin’s poem “Afternoons” where he describes young mothers watching their children at a playground, ending with: “Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.” Gemma’s one joy is watching the sun rise each morning, its beauty a reward, its freshness a promise.

The wonderful editor Dave King once wrote about what he called the gentle genre: “straightforward tales of ordinary people in mostly every-day, low-key situations.  No psychotics, no wrenching twists, no gore, no vampires or werewolves or demons.” These stories were popular in the early part of the 20th century, from writers such as Jan Karon, Angela Thirkell, D. E. Stevenson, Elizabeth Cadell, R. F. Delderfield, and Wendell Berry.

The problem with writing such a story is how to create enough tension and suspense to propel the reader through to the end when you can’t throw in a gang war or vampire to liven things up. Dave King defines two ways to keep a gentle story going without letting it become either boring or saccharine. One is for the author to pay close and detailed attention to the characters so the reader will recognise that even small things hold deep meaning for them. The other is to set the story in a small town where you can’t avoid interactions with your neighbors, even if their opinions differ from yours.

In terms of the first method, we do get to know Gemma and the experiences that shape her and her refusal to be pushed to the side of her life. Since the story is told from her point of view, we learn about the other characters as she does. As for the second, her life revolves around her family so they, rather than the small city where she lives, become the community she defines herself within. Conflicts with her parents, husband, and daughters animate Gemma’s story as she strives to carve out a space where she can be herself while still caring for them. As Dave King says, gentle books—of which this is one—are “driven by love.”

Stories driven by love are a much-needed balm these days. Gemma Sommerset reminds me about the importance of family and community. We might disagree, but we can do so with love. So maybe Gemma’s not so far away from the Sixties generation as I thought.

What novel have you read lately that reminded you of what really matters?

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

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The twenty-two chapters that make up this brief novel combine surprisingly poignant discussions between two women, one very young and one very old, with closely observed details of the natural world. The girl and her grandmother spend their summers together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, while Papa is also somewhere about, working. Jansson, author of the Moomintroll comic strip and books, apparently based much of it on her own summers on a similar island.

Early on, six-year-old Sophia “woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.” Although this death, almost an aside, is not mentioned again, we are reminded that summer and death go hand in hand: “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” The transitory nature of life haunts the story and adds depth to the exchanges between Sophia and her grandmother.

The chapters are deceptively plain yet leave the reader aware that each seemingly normal summer adventure—diving into water, entertaining a friend, studying worms—holds a deeper meaning. Jansson’s simple and direct language invites consideration of subtext and metaphor. It leaves a silence similar to the white space around a line of poetry, space where a reader can bring forward her own memories. Surely you, too, have been here: “The forest was full of rustling and whispering. There was a wonderful smell of pine and damp moss. Everything was soft and springy underfoot. You could see a long way between the tree trunks, and here and there sunlight fell on patches of berries.”

I know Sophie and her grandmother as surely as though they are real people in my life. Avoiding sentiment and stereotypes, Jansson gives us a child with strong opinions who feels safe enough to voice them, and a grandmother who is ill and often in pain but who wants to help this child while she can. They speak the truth to each other—how rare is that between the very old and the very young? Such bluntness sometimes means expressing irritation or anger, yet they always speak with love.

They cheat at cards and argue about God. “Sophia asked how God could keep track of all the people who prayed at the same time. ‘He’s very, very smart,’ Grandmother mumbled sleepily under her hat. ‘Answer really,’ Sophia said. ‘How does He have time?’ ‘He has secretaries…’ “

A postcard of Venice leads the grandmother to explain that the city is sinking, and they build their own version of Venice, creating palazzos, bridges and gondolas: “There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.”

Most of all, they wander about exploring the island. They walk the shore looking for what the sea has washed up in the night. They are careful not to step on the fragile moss. “Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies.” Fragility and protection run through the book. Sophia helps her grandmother when they crawl into the Magic Forest, a dense tangle of dead and living trees, twisted by the wind. Trying to clear a path or separate them “might lead to the ruin of the magic forest,” but left alone, “the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by.’

Although the publisher indicates that the book is about a single summer, there are indications that these are fragments from several summers, floating up as memories do, one calling another, each so unexpected, so vivid, yet mysteriously connected. I came away thinking about the ways we take care of each other and of the natural world. I think about how we connect and what we pass on. This is a book I will come back to again and again.

Summer is a little more than half over for most of us. What has been your favorite summer read?

Beryl Blue, Time Cop, by Janet Raye Stevens

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Librarians! I admire them all. They know so much and are incredibly generous. So when I met a librarian who’d written a suspense story about a time-traveling librarian, how could I resist?

Beryl Blue, librarian-in-training, is going about her business one day in 2015—her business at that moment being shelving books—when she falls off a ladder and into an adventure. Caught by the mysterious Glo Reid who materializes from 2031, Beryl is given a mission to go back to 1943, where World War II is in full swing, and prevent a man from being killed. She—this perfectly ordinary young woman—is the only one who can eliminate the assassin.

It sounds far-fetched, but we quickly learn enough about her past—and her tendency to run away from trouble—to go along with it. To her consternation, the place where she has landed is her very own town, at least a past version of it.

Beryl’s story makes for an entertaining summer read. I especially liked the details from 1943: the slang, the music, the clothes. From the rooming house to the nightclubs, Beryl sticks with Sergeant Tom Sullivan and his mates while they celebrate their embarkation leave. He thinks he’s protecting her, while she knows it’s the other way around.

While keeping an eye out for the assassin even though she knows she’d never be able to actually kill him, Beryl struggles to answer Sully’s questions about where she’s from and why she—a single woman—is on her own. Her 21st century views on things like smoking and women’s roles are challenged by the mores of the period. Meanwhile, she is wondering why this one man’s life is essential to saving the future as she knows it.

Plot twists abound, challenging Beryl’s understanding of herself and leading to a satisfying conclusion. There are three more books in the series: something to look forward to.

What books do you turn to for light-hearted entertainment?

Clear, by Carys Davies

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In 1840s Scotland, John Ferguson makes the difficult decision to become one of the evangelical ministers leaving the Church of Scotland to help form the Free Church of Scotland. It means giving up his job and income, but at least his church will be free of patronage and interference from the British Government. Also, it’s not the life he’d promised his wife Mary, but she accepts his choice.

The other major political upheaval besides the Disruption of the Church of Scotland is the ongoing Highland Clearances in Scotland which saw wealthy rural landowners evicting tenant farmers to clear the land for cattle or sheep. Most of the people in my book club were not familiar with the Clearances, which caused immense poverty and fury among the rural poor. A couple of us knew about them through our reading or family stories, but none of us had heard of the Disruption.

Desperate for funds, John jumps at the offer of a temporary, well-paying job as a factor. His assignment is to travel to a remote Scottish island and evict the lone remaining inhabitant—Ivar—so the island may be turned over to sheep. However, soon after arriving on the island he’s badly injured in a fall from a cliff.

Ivar finds the unconscious man and takes him into his home to nurse him. For a long period, John does not remember why he is there and busies himself learning Norn, the ancient language used by Ivar, so the two can communicate.

This lovely story is told in through three perspectives: Ivar, John and Mary. The author’s descriptions of the lonely island and Ivar’s life there are stunning both for their beauty and their authenticity. I especially enjoyed the language lessons, using actual Norn words that are poetic in their precision, such as the word “for the moment before something happens; for the state of being on the brink of something.”

It’s also a story of connection, of how a life of isolation and solitude can be transformed by the arrival of another human being. The author’s spare, elegant prose turns the book into, as one member of my book club said, a real gem.

Curiously, everyone in the book club understood the ending differently. No spoilers here, though many reviewers have criticised the ending as abrupt and unearned. For us, even though we read it aloud several times, we still understood it to mean different things.

That’s okay with me. I don’t mind endings where the story seems to go on after you close the book. In fact, the different endings we came up with said more about each of us that they did about the book. One person suggested we write to the author and ask her to write a sequel, though that mostly reflected our desire to spend more time with the characters.

I do mind when the ending is unearned. I believe the story could have prepared the ground for it a little better, but I actually liked it as it is.

If you enjoyed Small Things Like These, you might enjoy this story. I certainly did, and that was one thing that my book club did agree on: we all were immensely glad to have read it.

What books set on a Scottish island have you enjoyed?