Top Ten Tuesday: Books of Autumn

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Fall so here are ten corresponding books I have read:

The Autumn People by Ruth M. Arthur (1973). This is a time-slip set mostly in Scotland, which Romilly visits with her grandmother. She gets caught up in a family tragedy from many years ago and falls in love with a ghost.  This always reminded me of Time at the Top by Mabel Esther Allan, another favorite. 

Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser - a retelling of Cinderella

Cinderella is one of those stories that everyone knows and accepts the basic premise: cruel stepmother, exploited stepdaughter, bullying stepsisters, a fairy godmother, and a prince to rescue Ella from the ashes. Some modern versions provide a heroine who focuses on self-actualization over marriage as a form of rescue but those are less likely to find favor among little girls who love the Disney princesses. So I was intrigued to hear about this book which tells the Cinderella story from the point of view of the stepmother.

Some Autumn Favorites

The weather is suddenly cooler, blankets are back on our beds, and I am thinking of books about Autumn:

Autumn Term by Antonia Forest (1948). Twins Nicola and Lawrie are heading to Kingscote School, determined to be as impressive as their elder sisters, but things start badly on the train when Nicola pulls the emergency cord and never seem to recover . . .

Six Degrees of Separation - from Hamnet to Something's Rotten in the State of Maryland

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where we end up. This month’s starting point is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, a book about Shakespeare's son that has been widely recognized as one of the best books of 2020. I decided to buy it for my sister for Christmas and called the bookstore to ask them to hold it for me (“You want the book with the feather on the cover?” asked the guy on the phone dubiously). There wasn’t time to finish it before I had to mail it to New York (and it still didn’t get there for Christmas – boo!) but I liked what I read and am now on the reserve list at the library.

A Perfect Gentle Knight by Kit Pearson - and the danger of too much imagination

Title: A Perfect Gentle Knight
Author: Kit Pearson
Publication: Penguin Canada, hardcover, 2007
Genre: Children’s Fiction
Setting: 1950s Vancouver
Audience: Middle Grade verging on Young Adult

Description: The six Bell children have relied on each other and their passion for the Knights of the Round Table to cope with losing their mother three years ago.  Their father, who was in the car accident too, is also grieving but he stays in his study and only emerges on Sundays to take the children to church and out to dinner.   The rest of the week they attend school but otherwise run wild; Sebastian, the eldest at 14, leads his siblings in knightly games every afternoon and even the 6-year-old twins are pages, enthusiastically practicing their swordsmanship.  But Sebastian is being bullied at school, Roz decides she wants to be a normal junior high student, and the three youngest children are becoming rude and grubby.   Cordelia (Corrie), the narrator, begins to worry that the game is getting out of hand and is unnerved when Sebastian tells her he is the reincarnation of Sir Lancelot.  She holds the family together as long as she can,  terrified of precipitating a disaster by confiding in an adult until it is almost too late.

Best School Stories

Here is an article from the London Times with a top 25 boarding school stories - most of which I agree with (a few I have not read!):

5) The Autumn Term, Cricket Term and Attic Term by Antonia ForestForest wrote only 13 novels, all but one connected with the Marlow family. Ten of them were about the Marlow children, beginning with the Autumn Term (written in 1948) and were fabulous tales of the six girls and two boys. They deserve to be better-known. I particularly remember Nicola and Lawrie, the two youngest sisters, who didn't quite live up to the standards of their hugely successful older sisters at Kingscote, the family boarding school.Autumn Term, and its sequels, The Cricket Term and the Attic Term and were funny, beautifully written, and seemed far more realistic than many of the other boarding schools books around (especially when it came to the relationship between all the sisters).