Friday's Bookshelf Traveling

I liked Judith's idea at Reader in the Wilderness of visiting a bookshelf that hasn’t been getting a lot of attention so gazed around the room where I sit most often – this particular shelf sometimes gets ignored because it has the much-read-and-referenced Betsy-Tacy books on the shelf above and the almost equally beloved Beany Malone and Elswyth Thane books on the two shelves below!  I am not sure how this happened.

My bookshelves usually have some kind of theme, although there are aberrations like this one.   This shelf has a couple overflow Betsy-Tacys hidden on the left, three fantasies by Kristin Cashore (I loved Graceling and Fire), and then a row of books by Madeleine Polland. 

 

Madeleine A. Polland (1918 – 2005) was an Irish-born author, primarily known for her highly regarded children’s books although it is her adult historical fiction that I have read and reread most recently.   In The Third Book of Junior Authors, which I picked up at one of my favorite hangouts, The Traveler Restaurant, she reveals:

It always pleases me when people ask me what type of books I write, to say that I specialize in ghost stories.  This naturally causes raised eyebrows, as none of my books appear to be conventionally of this type.

What I was referring to is my preoccupation, since I was a small child, with the feet that have walked before mine . . . As I grew older, and began to read more, and to study history for myself, this obsession grew, and with it some faculty to sense the past in certain places or concerning certain people.   It is this obsession that has written all of my historical books.

She worked at a library, then as a WAAF in radar during WWII, and met her husband near the end of the war.  They had two children, and a friend in publishing suggested she try a book.  She wrote The Children of the Red King, set at the time of the Norman Conquest in 13^th century Ireland, with the first of many strong female characters.  Her historical fiction can be compared to Rosemary Sutcliff and Hester Burton, with well-developed characters and authentic, convincing settings.  I found her children’s books in the Newton Boys & Girls Library and enjoyed them, although some were dark or sad or both.  One of my favorites, Shattered Summer (1969), is set during the summer of 1685 when the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, tried to seize the throne from his uncle.  This was the last battle fought on English soil.  

One of her best known is Deirdre (1967, based on the Celtic legend, Deirdre of the Sorrows), which was well-reviewed but overshadowed as it came out the same year as From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth,  and The Egypt Game. My copy is my actual childhood library copy, which I found on the discard shelf a few years ago (one is always torn between sorrow at such a book being weeded and satisfaction at passing by at that exact moment).  She also wrote two children’s contemporary suspense novels, which are a good blend of unnerving and convincing.

I must have been pleased when I started using the adult library around the corner and found Polland's adult novels or possibly my mother found them first.  At least one is romantic suspense but most are historical fiction, faintly reminiscent of Daphne DuMaurier’s historicals but warmer.   My favorite is Sabrina (1979), which I highly recommend.   Set in Ireland, just before WWI, it is a dramatic story about a girl from an affluent family who falls in love with the son of her mother’s best friend: normally, an ideal situation.  But Sabrina’s strong-minded mother had decided Sabrina should become a nun and she has no intention of allowing any of her children to disrupt her plans for their futures.  It is impossible to take this book down without starting a reread – a bad idea, when I have an end of semester project on Bletchley Park due May 3, not to mention my real job is keeping me busy remotely.   Madeleine was on the south coast during the war, not Bletchley Park, but I suspect she and I would have had a lot to discuss.  She appears to have written 31 books altogether, so if library book sales ever resume, I have some collecting still to do, as all her books are well worth reading!

How do you arrange an author’s books, when they are different genres, not to mention different sizes?  It looks like here I shelved the adult hardcovers, then the adult paperbacks (my fingers are twitching that those two are not alphabetical but I decided it would be cheating to fix it), and then the children’s books.   The card is from my friend Emily - it's perfect!