I do find that American book jackets can be desperately unappealing ... I mean, honestly, would you even think of picking up this dreary-looking thing in a bookshop? But I've been wallowing in Montmaray with guilty pleasure for the past couple of days. I don't read teen books very often but I'd have been in heaven if this had been around when I was 12. And if I were 12, I don't suppose I'd notice, let alone care that author Michelle Cooper has helped herself liberally from I Capture the Castle.
This is the journal of Sophia Margaret Elizabeth Jane Clementine FitzOsborne, begun this twenty-third day of October 1936, on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday ...
And if she isn't quite writing this sitting in the kitchen sink, listening to the dripping roof and watching her sister Rose ironing her only nightgown - well, give or take a title, Princess Sophia and Cassandra Mortmain are almost interchangeable. If Cassandra lives with her eccentric family in a decaying castle in the middle of the nowhere in the 1930s, the FitzOsbornes are living it in spades in their castle in the
tiny island kingdom of Montmaray somewhere in the Bay of Biscay. There's a mad king, still wracked by WWI - a mad housekeeper, shades of Mrs Danvers - the housekeeper's handsome son - invading Nazis - secret passages - bombs ... and a bit too much author-splaining about the Spanish Civil War, Mrs Simpson and historical background, though maybe that wouldn't grate so much on a teen reader. Never mind, it was a jolly enjoyable read-in-bed although for my money, you can't beat
Guard Your Daughters which has been republished by Persephone since I wrote about it two years ago. (I can't claim credit because lots of bloggers were urging it!)
Although the first book ends on a cliffhanger, I wasn't sure whether I'd continue with the Montmaray saga but as I was ordering
this on Amazon last night - couldn't resist my baking heroine
Regula Ysewijn at such a hefty reduction - I decided I needed something else to make up £10 and qualify for free postage. So that's three books bought this week, and I took three rather smaller books to the Oxfam shop - so it's one-in-one-out but not really solving the shelving crisis, is it?
Isn't Regula Ysewijn a fabulous name for a cook? I always think of her as Regulo Eis-wein but I'm probably mispronouncing her in my head.