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It's been a while since I've done any, and it's been a while since I finished this book, but the strength of my feeling about it hasn't faded much. It's actually a wonderful book in some ways for steepholm and me, because its use of historical setting (two of them, actually) is so openly costume and romance type of historical that I almost wondered at times if it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. (It's not.) Won't name this book, despite the fact that it got a good review in Kirkus, because it doesn't seem to be selling that wildly. I will give the name in comments, if anyone is curious.

As I said, this is time travel, from one historical setting to an older one, which is an interesting choice. To do time travel by any kind of mechanical means (a machine rather than a portal, say) will require some engagement with modern science, obviously, even if the scientific mechanism isn't explored much. But this one starts in 1913, which allows for a softer, fuzzier take on the "how" of the time travel, not that I think it's a successful one.

The 1913, small-town England setting is treated quite differently from the medieval one, in that the relationship with history seems rather different in the two. The heroine, Addy, is the fifteen-year old daughter of an unmarried seamstress in a small, nosy village, and I didn't get beyond the third page before my head started shaking. Somehow Addy's mother has managed to keep her in school, which is unlikely in itself, but it's far more unlikely that the better off girls in the school know that her mother is unmarried and taunt her by calling her "bastard" and her mother a "slut". Okay, maybe this is just in the realm of the possible, but it's all extremely unlikely. 1) The mother probably couldn't have kept her baby without any family support; 2) if she'd got enough money from someone (the father being the obvious source) to do so, she'd have adopted an honorific Mrs. and become a widow somewhere; 3) the mothers who told their daughters that Addy was illegitimate (which they wouldn't have) would have very likely refused to give her mother their custom IF (again, extremely unlikely) her daughter had been in the same school as their respectable little darlings. Women who could sew and needed the money they'd get from doing so were not exactly a rarity at the time.

When Addy gets into a fight at school her mother carries through on her threat to take her out of school and put her in service. A place just *happens* to open up for Addy at the house of a very wealthy but eccentric-and-with-tragic-history gentleman, which Addy gets, despite her lack of experience and the great desirability of the position. When the woman who held the position before Addy gives her a run-down on her job, there are some really glaring slips. First, she tells Addy that Mr. Greenwood likes to keep the drapes closed, "But I say a person needs proper light for vacuuming". For one thing, "vacuum" as a verb is not a British usage. Then she goes on to show Addy the vacuum (also much more likely to be called a Hoover), calling it a "nasty, heavy, unwieldy thing". But a vacuum cleaner was not at all a commonplace item owned by every household (rather a luxury) and the woman who worked there wouldn't have seen many newer, better machines, if she ever saw a vacuum cleaner at all. Much more likely that she'd just have swept the room, rugs and all - this was still common practice in the 50s and probably beyond. None of this really matters much except that it adds to the sense that the historical setting is more playing at "Upstairs, Downstairs" (or just the maid-costume part

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Had a pathetic beginning of a post saved, talking a bit about the hound's sufferings over Hallowe'en and starting on the latest historical book discussion, but it was neglected on my desktop while I hung out with Becca, who was here for the weekend, and Younger Daughter, and as I finished Connie Willis' All Clear. The All Clear write-up will have to wait, as I loved it so much I have to do it right, so for now I'll finish off my earlier attempt to bring another glorious recent YA historical to -- no, let's be honest, to rant yet again. With quotes, but as with a few recent entries, no author or title in the post, though details provided if requested.

This one was supposed to be steepholm's, as it was very readily available locally, but as it somehow hadn't been steeped yet, and as I found it in Bristol airport when my flight was delayed three hours, I figured I'd have to take the hit once more. Not just sharing the "it burns" quotes to spread around the pain, as I think some of them show something I'm seeing fairly often: the superimposing of the author's feelings about religious beliefs on a late 16th century story. (I have just noticed the automatically "got" music, and promise it was got automatically and I had no hand in it whatsoever.)
The book is set in England in 1596 and the protagonist is illegitimate - oddly, something I've encountered twice very recently is a great deal of bullying and abuse of the protag because she's illegitimate. It feels all wrong, and I'm wondering if it's really just a handy-dandy device to get the girl on the outside of the usual YA cool girls' clique? Anyway, once her grandparents died, she and her mother have lived on the outskirts of the village, literally and figuratively. She has a friend who'd been valued in the village as a healer until there'd been a plague and people had turned on her as a witch, whipped up by the parson, of course. (The wise woman escaped and lives in a hut she built in the forest near the village. )

And we get this line: "[Protag] had lost what little faith in God she had had during that time." What? This is surely a totally modern "idea" of an Elizabethan 13-year-old girl's response to a traumatic happening, and is very loosely thrown together with more contemporary mindset statements, like that protag is frightened of witches. And later, she asks the friend, who is in fact a witch, if she and her sister-witch believe in God and then regrets having asked because " to deny God's existence would condemn [them] to Hell". Sigh. But it's all fine and dandy because they reply that they believe in a God and a Goddess. When I read some of the witchey chants, I wasn't at all surprised to find that the only source the author seems to have used is a book on Wicca as a New Age religion. SIGH. This witch's "covey" is very, very New Age, talking about the "sacred task performed by witches for thousands of years, that of preserving the dignity and preciousness of all life", for example. Or when her friend the witch is chased away from her hut again, by ravaging villagers (again, put into their frenzy by the pastor, of course!), there's, "A place of peace and sanctuary had been violated, and Nature was not blind to that." There are also an extraordinary number of witches within 3 or 4 miles of protag's village too, given the low population of the area.

But, one atheist who still worries about her friends going to hell and a lot of very anachronistic witches isn't enough for this book. No, we have *another* character who's shed his silly old belief in God. In ways, this on

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As promised. Despite a brain filled with mush (flu vaccine reaction plus 2 nights' rotten sleep) and gloom (British spending review. Does George Osborne really think he can make it all okay by saying "Fairness" a gazillion times? And furthermore calling them "savings we've found in the budget" doesn't make them anything other than cuts. No it does not.).

The connection between sartorias' Coronets and Steel and Hilary McKay's Wishing for Tomorrow was a random thought that passed through my head one night as I was trying to get to sleep, and has stuck there. Possibly its sticking has as much to do with the amount of readerly pleasure I got from the two books as anything, but it also seems to me to give yet another perspective on the endlessly fascinating matter of how writers present the past. ("Present the past" btw, was totally unintentional, but its dual meaning is perfect. Sometimes English rocks. ) Although the past to be presented is quite different in the two books, it seems to me that there's a surprising degree of similarity in the way -- well, not the way it's done, exactly, but one way in which it's experienced. Must admit that I've never read The Prisoner of Zenda, but steepholm has said many times that being able to talk about a book you've never read is a trademark academic skill, so I won't let that stop me. If embarrassing mistakes ensue, just hum to yourselves and move along, okay?


Both Coronets and Steel and Wishing for Tomorrow are homages to older books - to The Prisoner of Zenda and The Little Princess respectively, which is the major apparent similarity between them. Unless Wiki has let me down (unthinkable!) The Prisoner of Zenda was published in 1894, while A Little Princess was published in 1904, but is an expansion of the earlier Sara Crewe, serialized in 1888, so the mean date of publication as it were, is quite close. The fact that Wishing for Tomorrow is a sequel to A Little Princess while Coronets and Steel has a modern setting and none of the characters of the earlier book doesn't make as much difference as it might be expected to, I think.

Starting with Wishing for Tomorrow, in a way, the attempt to write a successful (for any values of successful) sequel to A Little Princess would seem doomed from the outset. The big emotional payoff that comes from the restoration of Sara to her 'proper place' in life is so dependent on an understanding of society that really isn't one most people can comfortably hold to now. Even though Sara's nobility is shown to be unrelated to her current financial situation, it's anything but class-free. No matter how choked up we get in reading the scene in the bakery with the girl who's even hungrier than Sara, or how pleased we are to see that the inspired baker has hired the girl so she's never hungry again, it's always Sara who's inspirational, or generous enough to remain a friend to Becky after she's restored to wealth, never the lower-class character.

On the other hand, an unsubtle "updating" of the story, with Sara becoming a crusader for social justice rather than a

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Not a contest with prizes, I'm afraid, but just some questions about which I would love opinions, informed, unformed or whatever. I won't name the book concerned in questions 1 & 2, as it's first book and not big-name and I'm obviously not very impressed, though I'll be happy to do so in comments if anyone wants to rush out and get a copy (or avoid it).

1) The year is 1582. The book uses a very uneven mix of cod, er, archaic and modern language, but is obviously for the most part attempting some kind of olde language. (For example, just before the following quote, a character reflects that while she may look as beautiful as a rosebud waiting to be gathered she had already "been plucked and well swived".) And then there's this:

X frowned. "You dragged me out of college to get you married off to advantage and you waste an opportunity like this to impress some rich young lady on a maid without prospects? Y, you need your head examining."

My answer: might come close! Okay, there's obviously a typo, and it's not well expressed anyway, but the combination of bad use of language and complete disaster wrt mindset makes it pretty distinctive.

Just a page or two after this, there's another impressive one though, in which POV character in the scene says he hopes he manage to "sustain the romantic illusion" in a joust - which I knew was totally wrong, though I've now forgotten the year in which "romantic" was first used in that sense that Steepholm supplied. Suffice it to say much, much later than the 1500 or 1600s. Same character also says to himself "the game's afoot" when the jousting starts.

Or - have another: in a discussion about the rich bride this impoverished Earl has to land to repair the family fortunes, he says "I'd prefer her to agree to the match because she wants it, not because others tell her to marry me." His brother chuckles in reply, "That's very enlightened of you."

Any other answers?

As I said behind cut #1, this character has become an earl on his father's death, and the family has been ruined by the time he inherits, by his father's belief in alchemy and support of one (perfectly honest) alchemist. Earl of Dorset, btw, just in case it might be some crap little earldom in -- oh, wild Ireland or something.


It doesn't feel at all right to me, though I'm obviously no expert in the kinds of money one believer could spend on supporting an alchemist. (Just the one, with a dependent daughter, who appears to have received next-to-nothing for her own maintenance. So we're not talking about a *hive* of alchemists with expensive tastes being supported.)

If anything, this feels to me like an attempt to co-opt the very typical situation in Regencies of a head of family gambling away all the money onto an Elizabethan setting. I'm sure it *could* be done, but it still feels more than a bit off. (Also odd that the feckless alchemist father appeared in _Alchemy and Meggy Swann_, done very credibly, and in this, done not so credibly.)

Finally, and mostly arising from reading The Queen's Daughter, by Susan Coventry, but I didn't get around to asking after the question occurred to me --

I think of this as the territory of teens and young adults of today, though not of course, unknown in oldies like myself. (Not that I'm sure I can do a perfect roll - I can cross my eyes excellently, but I'm not sure there's a proper arc being followed in the eye roll attempts.) Anyway! I was very surprised to see it coming up in The Queen's Daughter, where it was actually Joan's father, Henry II of England, who rolled his eyes at Joan, which (from memory) she said was more distressing to her than straight chastisement.

I was sure Steepholm would be able to quote me a nice Renaissance line proving that the eye roll has been with us for centuries, but no. So

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I was talking to steepholm a while ago about how I was looking forward to the (UK) release of A Most Improper Magick by Stephanie Burgis. In part this is because it had sounded good and then sarah_prineas commented and said it was wonderful. But also I was saying that we had no books set in the Regency era for our book, which seemed a bit odd. Having said that I remembered that Sorcery and Cecelia, when republished, was done as YA, as, of course, were the subsequent two books. So, I'm happy about being able to include those, at least in thinking about books set in our last period (Restoration to the near-present - it's a big one!), though we may well end up writing nothing about them. But other than that, I'm having real difficult seeing Sorcery and Cecelia *as* a YA book. Not in an "it's inappropriate" sort of way, of course. I don't know how much of my feeling about the book relates to discovering it back in its near-cult days, on the DWJ mailing list, and feeling incredibly pleased to have paid quite a bit too much for a ratty old pb copy, just because I'd been able to find it. I'm thinking of waiting to reread until I can read the YA copy, in order to have as few resonances with my first couple of readings in my head as possible. We shall see how that works.

I also find it somewhat peculiar that Sorcery & Cecelia was published as YA and the Mairelon books (Mairelon the Magician and Magician's Ward, which I have together as Magic & Malice) have just come out in a compendium as A Matter of Magic, which is not YA, despite the cover. That cover to me says YA, although I suppose Kim's having a head and all might argue against that feeling. And then again there's Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, which is also republished and also YA, though the original edition in Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series was not.

(No real point to these ramblings, except it's of interest to me, and also, for our purposes - writing a book about historical fiction for children - it does actually make a big difference whether or not a book is considered to be 'for children'. You'd hear cranky rantings from me if it ever happened, but all the same, part of me wishes like crazy that someone would do a YA edition of To Say Nothing of the Dog so we could include it!)

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[Have had coeliac blood-test now, and results should be with GP in a week and a half-ish. Decided to stay on the gluten until I *have* a result, which seemed like a better idea when I made it on Tuesday than it does today, when head feels as if it may fall off when I try to think at all, and I mightn't mind if it did.]

So, good state in which to write up a book that has a lot of interest for two areas steepholm and I are particularly considering: use of language (anachronistic, archaic or authentic?) (couldn't resist the alliteration, although it's not a straight choice between these three, necessarily!), and the depiction of attitudes which were common in the past but are now considered unacceptable.

I read the first half of Karen Cushman's latest at the end of the 48 Hour Reading Challenge, and I think one of the reasons I didn't love it as whole-heartedly as I might have was the fact that the language seemed more intrusive to me than that in, say, Catherine Called Birdy. If it turns out to be true that the language is actually different -- more archaic-seeming, let's call it for now -- in a book set in Elizabethan England compared to one set in 13th century England - well, that's a very interesting data point! Some of the language in both is played for laughs a bit - Meggy is the daughter of the village ale-wife and has a sharp tongue and mouthful of colourful insults, which rather corresponds to Birdy's search for her perfect curse word. But it may be that it's simply that some of the archaic words used in Meggy Swann weren't pleasing to my reading ear, rather than that there are more of them. Will need to reread to confirm this one way or the other.

The other interesting element to us here is that Meggy is crippled - an Author's Note tells the reader she has bilateral hip dysplasia - only able to walk with a severe limp, and with chronic pain. What's pretty great about the book is that it manages both to show clearly how difficult life is for Meggy, given that she faces abusive treatment from many as well as the huge problems of getting around and caring for herself, and how her strength of character allows her make herself a good life. The author's note again discusses the change that was taking place at the time, from the medieval belief that an illness or infirmity was caused by the Devil or was a punishment by God, towards the modern belief in natural causes. When Meggy comes to London, supposedly at the invitation of her father, she finds that he thought she was a boy, and was prepared to get a helpful servant, rather than a daughter with some needs of her own. The house, and London in general, is anything but friendly to people with disabilities.

It occurred to me that there's sort of a parallel in the balance Cushman strikes in Meggy Swann and in Catherine, Called Birdy, in giving a resolution for the protagonist that seems tolerable to readers while still being just about within the limits of the possible for the time. Birdy isn't going to get the chance to fall in love with someone of her choice, but the marriage she can't evade is nonetheless tolerable because the son's character is totally different than the father's. Similarly, Meggy isn't going to be cured of her limp, nor will she be able to move freely and without pain. But she can - and does - find things she can do to increase her independence, some through her own ingenuity, some with the help of friends who care for her. And, from a purely uncritical perspective, the final scene of her dancing (on her 'walking sticks') is just lovely.

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One of the questions that steepholm and I are looking at in The History Book is a potential problem for all writers of historical fiction which may be especially acute for writers of children's historical fiction - how to handle the depiction of beliefs widely held in the past and now considered unacceptable. Two ways of dealing with this problem are to present a 'sanitized past', with at least the main characters (or the sympathetic subset of those main characters) displaying an 'ahistorically liberal breadth of sensibility' and at the other extreme, 'seeming to encourage divisiveness today by perpetuating in fiction the past’s bitter divisions'. (Quotes from our proposal - elegance of expression steepholm's doing.)

Although there isn't really any way to fail fail in this -- I write with slightly gritted teeth -- I suspect most lovers of historical fiction will have their limits for how far ahistoricity can go before they want to start throwing things, and also suspect most people couldn't enjoy a long, painful discourse displaying racial or religious hatred in dialogue or narrative, no matter how accurate. But one sees that latter 'fail' quite rarely, while the former 'fail' is relatively common - especially when romance sneaks in and the all-too-regularly feisty heroine convinces traditional but loving father to let her marry the one her heart has chosen and not the one his pocket/pride has picked out for her. There are many books that avoid either fail, for example by creating a link between reader and protagonist in one or other way, which lets reader feel comfortable with relatively likely (historically) outcomes. (Thinking specifically but not exclusively of Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack and Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy with respect to the question of parentally-arranged marriage.)

It had never even occurred to me that one could fail in both directions simultaneously. Until I read a YA fantasy lent to me recently - I won't name the book, both because I enjoyed much of it and wouldn't feel right throwing around the f-word without lots of tedious disclaiming, and also because the author protested my use of 'historical fiction' in my review on Goodreads but remained very pleasant in doing so. (For the record, we're including historical fantasy and SFnal time-travel, and this book had a map of Europe and an historic character, so was historical enough for our purposes. But not set in Britain so won't be discussed in The History Book.)



Anyway, we're talking an invented kingdom around Lyon roughly in the 1500s. (I think - possibly late 1400s). The King had a long-standing relationship with a woman from 'the Moroccos' and had a son by her, before marrying a Christian woman and having another son - his heir. But no tension between illegitimate and legitimate sons, Muslim and Christian, dark-skinned and lighter - because there's apparently perfect tolerance of all races and religions in this little kingdom. Go them. But also historical Fail of the first sort. Except that King has recently gone a bit off the rails in many ways and declared first son his heir, former heir has gone into hiding, and is there ever protest. So we have protag's horror and shock at the courtier

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