Tag: reading

Linda J Collins, Dreams of Revolution (BookBaby 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62634456-dreams-of-revolution?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ctQU6UAHvi&rank=5

1777 Hopewell, Pennsylvania
15-year-old Rachel Palsgrove sneaks around the side of the furnace to peek in the window. Inside her father is molding iron—at night.
Rachel’s wealthier friend Susanna dreams of living in a mansion. Rachel’s mother is anxious for her to find a beau, but she dreams of becoming a teacher. She goes to Philadelphia in hopes of studying at the university, defying the gentlemen-only rule, but it is closed due to the British occupation of the city.
While waiting for news from the college, she is brutalised by a British spy and is betrayed by her best friend. She makes a daring midnight ride (actually three days) to warn Patriots in Hopewell of an impending British raid and, while her beau is imprisoned, becomes a spy for General Washington.
I loved the references to historical American Revolution espionage, rich material for intrigue. The system—coded messages in invisible ink and coloured laundry on the line—is the same as the one historically used by Washington’s spies the Culper Ring. Rachel sweet-talks Captain Crammond the way Peggy Shippen groomed Benedict Arnold. And real historical figures like John André come into the story.
We meet the characters in the course of their daily lives, giving us an opportunity to learn about early American lifestyles—making soap, making coal, predicting the weather by looking at the colour of the ‘woolies’ (brown bears’) fur, getting letters to relatives in other towns, the wedding customs, etc.
I think we could have had an earlier indication that war with Britain is looming, some hints at how the characters felt about their colonial masters, perhaps. Rachel finally finds out what the men were making—cannons, defying the Iron Act—but we don’t see any Redcoats until chapter 20. I wish we could have reached the exciting bit, Mr Morris and Jesse’s arrest, earlier in the story.
I bought this book because my sister lives in modern-day Hopewell, and I love anything having to do with revolution.
Contains a rape, but it’s not graphic.

em.thompson, The Curious Case of the Kitnapped Cat (Eccentric Directions 2024)

Crime fiction at its most comedic

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213564034-the-curious-case-of-the-kitnapped-cat?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HpLkIRzai&rank=1

Terrence ‘Tiny’ Bottomley, a swot in Heather Prendergast’s class at Merton Police College, answers the teacher’s question on ‘the most important weapons in a modern detective’s armoury’.
‘Forensics, CCTV footage, DNA analysis…’ he begins.
Prendergast begs to disagree. She believes in ‘old fashioned gut instinct’. It may be that even her zany and filthy rich Aunt Elizabeth’s hefty bribes—I mean, donations—won’t be sufficient to get her to graduation so she can achieve her dream of becoming ‘Prendergast of The Yard’.
Armed with her Girl Guides training and her illustrated Sherlock Holmes almanac, Prendergast’s gut instincts lead her on another madcap case, in the course of which she is ever decked in the highest-end yet most outrageously inappropriate fashion from Paris or Milan. The campus cafeteria skivvy Debb’s gran’s cat Puffball is missing, and aided by Tiny and Debbs, Prendergast goes in pursuit, wreaking hilarious havoc everywhere she goes.
Em.thompson is a master comedic wordsmith, inventing words and phrases (‘cornerflap of pinafore’, ‘humzinger of a brainwave’, ‘bedraggled straggle of homelessness’, ‘earwigaphobia and occasional bouts of dreadheightedness’) and twisting metaphors into jokes (‘a helping hand from the long arm of the law’, ‘like impetigo on a honeydew melon’).
Despite the non-stop witticisms, there is a proper plot, and despite Prendergast’s kooky blundering some real detecting happens.
Move over, P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams.