forever we try

Another Random Old Children's Book picked up at a secondhand bookstore--I'd never finished anything by Vivien Alcock before but remembered coming across a couple of her books in the children's section of my old library back in the day. They all had interesting, weirdly haunting titles, like Singer to the Sea God. 

The Stonewalkers is also interesting and weirdly haunting, and very, very creepy. The plot kicks off when Poppy, a girl with a difficult relationship with her mom and a habit of lying, witnesses the stone statue she's kinda-sorta befriended, Belladonna, get struck by lightening and then painfully come to life. At first, Poppy's excited that one of her unbelievable stories is actually true, but Belladonna is...off. Aside from obviously being a statue who shouldn't be traipsing around in the first place, she's both uncomfortable in Poppy's world and jealous of it, and before long she's making her own plans. Plans that don't bode well for Poppy. 

Recently I've been stuck in a cycle of rewatching Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, a LONG documentary that's very expansive with its definition of folk horror (The Wicker Man? Obviously. Picnic at Hanging Rock? Why not? Candyman? Sure, you could make that argument!). The Stonewalkers slides right into that sure-why-not slot of folk horror with its rural setting (a moor somewhere in northern England, I think), outsider protagonist (Poppy's the new kid at school), and creepy statues reanimated by some form of ancient magic Poppy doesn't understand (she made Belladonna friendship bracelet out of some old chain she found in an ancient jar in her mom's employer's basement). It also has a great and believably tough mother-daughter relationship--Poppy and her mother aren't especially likable or easy to get along with, but the fact that they recognize that about themselves doesn't necessarily make them nicer to each other. 

This was a good one--I'd love to read more Alcock in the future. 

A couple weeks ago my roommates got to make a trip to The Book Thing, a warehouse full of donated books in Baltimore where once a month you can come in and pick out as many books us you want for free.  (Technically, there's a limit of 150,000 books per person per day, but GEEZ.) There's also a one-hour time limit; my roommates still managed to grab a whole bunch of books. Some of those were for me, including two in one of my favorite categories, Random Old Children's Books.

Here they are: 

A Chill in the Lane by Mabel Esther Allan
An atmospheric, not especially spooky ghost story set in Cornwall. On vacation with her family, Lyd begins experiencing visions of a cottage in the woods that isn't actually there, and starts to suspect it might tie back to her Cornish heritage--Lyd is adopted, and her parents, especially her father, would rather not talk about her biological family. That huge red flag aside, Lyd's parents are actually much more supportive than secretive adoptive families in ghost stories usually are. It's sweet but doesn't make for tense reading. But this is more of a family story with some light Gothic/ghost story elements. 

(This book also has a list of "Other Good Books for Girls" on the back. One of them, Tina and David, gets this kicker of a blurb: "[...] beautiful and exquisitely tasteful. Mrs. Tate has proved that a good book for the young can be written without sex, crime, or drugs.")

Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken
A reread and an old favorite. This is the third book in Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. The first book is a pretty standard pastiche of 19th century children's lit with a little bit of alternative history thrown in--at least that's how I remember it; it's also my least favorite book in the series--and every book after gets weirder and weirder. 

Nightbirds isn't quite peak Aiken weirdness, but it's getting there. Dido Twite, the closest this series has to a central heroine, wakes up after a months-long coma on a whaling ship headed, eventually, for Nantucket. Captain Casket only cares about chasing an elusive pink whale, but he promises Dido passage home if she can keep his daughter, Dutiful Penitence, company. This apparently includes staying with Dutiful Penitence and the girl's aunt, Tribulation, on Nantucket for a couple of months. 

Dutiful Penitence ("Pen"), doesn't have good memories of her aunt, and once the girls arrive in Nantucket they figure out that Tribulation is still a piece of work, staying in bed the whole day and running them ragged with chores. Dido also discovers a black dress and pair of bottle-green boots hidden in the attic, and begins to suspect that Aunt Tribulation isn't who she says she is. 

Part of the fun of this book is that, even though she's stuck in an objectively terrifying situation--holed up on an isolated farm with an imposter--Dido refuses to let Aunt Tribulation scare her. Here's a typical interaction between them: 

My reading tracker has a space for recording each book's genre. For this one I went with "Aiken."

Circe by Madeline Miller: Well-researched and well-written--aside from a couple deviations it follows the myths pretty closely, so the plot isn't all too unexpected and the middle chapters dragged a bit for me. I'm also not a huge fan of the way Miller chose to explain Circe's decision to turn the sailors who arrive on Aeaea into pigs( spoiler and a bit of a tw ) But the last few chapters, and especially the ending, made up for everything else. There's a bit of an unexpected twist that I really dug, and the very last scene is lovely.

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat: A memoir focused on the author's relationship with her father, who immigrated to the US when she was a toddler, and her uncle, whom she lived with in Haiti until she was twelve years old. I don't have much else to say about this one except that I really, really enjoyed it. It's very honest and some parts are brutal (in a nutshell: immigration policy in the US is massively screwed up and always has been; the same goes for US foreign policy), but overall the writing is matter-of-fact and warm. Love and deep family connections really shine through.

My Heart is Laughing by Rose Lagercrantz: A really cute chapter book translated from Swedish. It's also the second in a series, so now I want to read the rest.

On to Book Fourteen of War and Peace. If I'm being honest with myself I'll probably skim (or outright skip) the last here's-my-master's-thesis-on-history epilogue...or maybe not. We'll see. Either way, the end is in sight and I'm still not ready (though very much ready for Natasha and Pierre to admit their feelings to each other--again--and get together already).