Six Degrees of Separation – from Eats, Shoots & Leaves to The Thorn Birds

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place, add six books, and see where we end up. This month’s starting point was a big bestseller when new: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (2003). I think the original cover's cute panda was half the appeal but it was certainly popular with comma fans! Most think of Truss as a grammar guru but she also wrote several mysteries.

Leaves inspire my first degree, The Tender Leaves by Essie Summers (1980), a bestselling Mills & Boon writer. One of her favorite themes is searching for family and, in this book, nurse Maria accompanies a patient across the world to New Zealand so she can try to trace the father she never knew.  Essie's heroines are always pure in mind and motives so it is a shock when she is labeled a gold digger.

My second degree comes from the word tender. A Time for Tenderness (1962) is one of Betty Cavanna’s best YA novels. Teenage Peggy and her family move to Brazil for a year and she embraces the cultural experience, making new friends and falling in love, until her mother’s unexpected racism interferes.  This is another that was in my grade school library, convenient for many rereads until I had my own copy.

My third degree is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934). I actually don’t remember this very well but I have been thinking of the author since watching the recent Hemingway series on PBS. Hemingway came across as very arrogant and unappealing but F. Scott recognized his talent when they met in Paris and recommended Hemingway to his own editor.  Greater love hath no writer than to help someone else get published!

At the end of Blackhearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken, Dido Twite, an unappealing Cockney child, is thrown overboard. Aiken was not sentimental and planned to let her die but she received a letter from a reader that changed her mind. Instead, Dido became an intrepid and resourceful heroine when she was picked up by a whaler in Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966), next in the Wolves series and my fourth degree. I have never been to Nantucket, although it’s only a few hours away, but I read the first three books in this series frequently as a child and was fortunate to meet Joan Aiken once in New York. I wish I'd had more than 2 minutes to speak with her!

Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear (2004), second in the Maisie Dobbs series, is my fifth degree, staying with a birds theme. I really enjoyed the first few books about Maisie, a former servant, turned WWI nurse, turned private investigator. These books always seem like a cross between Upstairs Downstairs and Testament of Youth.  

My sixth degree is The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (1977), the epic saga set in Australia about beautiful Meggie Cleary and the ambitious priest she loves, Ralph de Bricassart. Is this one of the few miniseries that is as good or better than the book? And I like the book!

So this month I traveled from the comma to New Zealand, Brazil, Paris, Nantucket, back to England, and finally to Drogheda, the most famous fictional sheep station in Australia (in the world?). Have you read any of these? If you played #6Degrees this month, please share a link.

Next month (August 7, 2021), we’ll start with more bestselling nonfiction, Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher.

Six Degrees for July 2020