Devil Water by Anya Seton

This is an old-fashioned family saga of a historical novel by an author whose gift for creating memorable characters was matched by her painstaking research on the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Rebellions and the families who clung to the dream of the Stuarts regaining the throne. The story begins in 1709, when Charles Radcliffe, barely 16, is getting into trouble with a girl below his station, while he waits for his brother, James, the young Earl of Derwentwater, to return from France.

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, for the 1961 Club

My first book for the 1961 Club (in which we read books published in a certain year), hosted this week by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, is The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, an enthralling impersonation story set in Northumberland. Mary Grey, recently arrived from Canada, is sitting against Hadrian’s Wall, contemplating the countryside when she is accosted by a handsome man who thinks she is his cousin Annabel.

Bookshelf Traveling - June 5, 2020

Time for another round of Bookshelf Traveling in Insane Times which is being hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness.   The idea is to share one of your neglected bookshelves, and this week I have been visiting my Lorna Hill collection, which usually means traveling to the north of England or London.   I realized last weekend there are several of her books I never got around to reading, and I have been rectifying that omission.  I like her determined heroines, usually obsessed with career aspirations, who are charming but imperfect and lose their tempers regularly.