Early in Lives of Girls and Women, readers learn that Jubilee is "not part of town, but it was not part of the country either”. Del Jordan isn’t exactly sure where she belongs either. Readers of Dance of the Happy Shades will recognize Jubilee; some of its stories take place
E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks Hyperion, 2008 The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks made my TBR list thanks to Erin Blakemore’s The Heroine’s Bookshelf, wherein Frankie is included as a literary sister to Jo March. (That’s for her ambition, largely.) And it was nudged up the list
What is it about a title story? It always feels, to me, like the key to the collection. And while it’s true that sometimes a title story is my favourite in a collection, other times, as with “Dance of the Happy Shades”, I wondered why it was selected to bestow
Reading in company. It’s always more fun, isn’t it? Not that a stack of Persephones and a stack of lemon cakes aren’t enjoyable in and of themselves. But there’s something about knowing that there are similar stacks of books and stacks of sweets at hand for other readers. That, just
Isobel English’s Every Eye (1956) Persephone Number 18 Persephone Books, 2000 Cynthia has died. We learn that in the first sentence of Every Eye. From Hatty. Who is telling her story from the perspective of her middle years. Hatty is freshly married and Cynthia has freshly died. Both events have
