Favorite book from your childhood

I feel as though I’ve talked about  favourite books from my childhood several times already: The Bobbsey Twins, Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (I might at Trixie Beldon and books by Enid Blyton here.) I can’t really remember a time in my life when I wasn’t reading. Getting the Scholastic order forms at school was a happy time for me (still is, truth be told). Receiving books as gifts, equally wonderful.

Just to shake things up I am going to mention the book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden. My book has the exact cover seen to the right, but my book has seen better days. I don’t remember who gave me the book, but I adored it. It’s the story of  a little girl called Nona who leaves India to live with her aunt and cousins in chilly England. Nona isn’t happy, and then someone sends her two Japanese dolls that Nona feels are as displaced as she is. Published in 1961, this book survived many, many moves and now sits on my daughter’s bookshelf. She loves it as much as I do.

Favourite Romance Book

Yes, it’s true…I am a romantic at heart. A total, card carrying romantic. Love, Actually makes me cry every.single.time.

I am a sucker for the angsty ending. (Hello, Buffy/Angel shipper.) I love the long looks across the crowded room, the single touch that ignites a firestorm of passion, the stolen kisses. The happily-ever-after…when it’s done just right. (I’ve never read the book but the film The Notebook is my idea of the perfect romance…or maybe it’s just that Ryan Gosling is my idea of the perfect man…even though I am old enough to be his mother.)

I used to be a huge LaVyrle Spencer fan. I remember reading her novel, Morning Glory  into the wee hours because I just couldn’t put it down. I haven’t read any of her novels for years and I suspect I’d find them too sugary now.

Therefore, my favourite romance novel would have to be The Time Traveler’s Wife. Handsome hero, smart and beautiful heroine, fated and star-crossed…I just loved this book. My advice if you haven’t yet read it…is to ignore the timestamp – it just gets confusing trying to piece it all together. I looked at the ages of Henry and Clare and then read. And wept.

Favorite book turned into a movie

I think the BBC did an excellent job adapting Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. It’s well worth the watch.

I also loved what Robert Redford did with Judith Guest’s novel, Ordinary People. If you haven’t seen this movie, Mary Tyler Moore is a revelation.

I think it would be easier to talk about the botched film adaptations: The Time Traveler’s Wife (so bad), One Day (even though I haven’t seen the movie, Anne Hatheway’s accent – and I adore Anne Hatheway and think she’s a terrific actress – is horrible)

A book that disappointed you

Lots of books disappoint me. Sometimes it’s because they don’t live up to the hype (Eat, Pray Love), sometimes it’s because I’ve slogged through them only to arrive at a mediocre ending (The Elegance of a Hedgehog), a book by an writer I can normally count on that I just didn’t like (Rise and Shine) and sometimes I’ve loved the book only to arrive at an ending that just doesn’t do the book justice (Still Missing).

I find myself abandoning books earlier now than I used to. I have too many books on my to-be-read shelf and not enough time.

Favourite book of your favourite writer.

Oops. I skipped this question, which should have come immediately after I wrote about my favourite writer: Carolyn Slaughter.

I’d have a hard time naming my favourite book by Ms. Slaughter. The Banquet was the novel I discovered first and the book that sent my scurrying to find more of her work.

I am waiting for them to come. I’m not frightened at all. Their coming is the only certainty, so I hold to it.

Thus begins Harold’s story of his relationship with Blossom, a young Marks and Spencer shop girl.

But I also love her novel The Story of the Weasel (also called Relations). And her book Magdalene. Whatever she turns her hand to,  the result is always sublime for me.

Favourite female character.

I loved the characters, Sue and Maude, in Sarah Waters’ phenomenal novel Fingersmith.  The story is told, first from Sue’s point of view and then from Maude’s and it’s hard to imagine loving either of them given the nasty business they’re messed up in. But Waters’ Victorian-era novel is so layered and rich and exciting and the characters so fully-realized and compelling…it’s almost impossible not to empathize with and root for both girls.

I also love Sara Crewe from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princes.

Of course the greatest power Sara possessed, and the one which gained her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was ‘the show pupil’, the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of themselves, was her power of telling stories and making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.

It is Sara’s imagination which sustains her when hope is lost. I admired that quality so much when I was a child, and I still do.

Other female characters I admired: Jo from Little Woman; Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre; Anne from Anne of Green Gables

The girls from my youth. Girls with spirit and full-hearts and hope.

Favourite male character

What can I say, I love the bad boys. The Heathcliffs and the Rochesters

Jesse from Kristin McCloy’s Velocity:

…he wants me and he is so sure of himself, all I have to do is respond, and I can’t help but respond, he calls everything I am up beneath his fingertips…Your mother wouldn’t like me, huh. I can tell he’s proud of this, that he likes to be considered dangerous. I almost tell him that my mother is dead, but then I don’t. I look at him wondering what my mother would think…surely she would be struck by those eyes. Any woman would. Even a dead woman.

but I also adored Henry from Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. He is so beautifully, tragically, romantic.

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

I also admired Jack, the narrator of Frederick  Busch’s book Girls. Damaged, ironic, tough and sometimes so funny, Jack is a character who seemed very real to me.

I am not unintelligent. “You are not an unintelligent writer,” my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne…He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him… You are not an unintelligent driver, I said.”

Your Favourite Writer

The writer I have most consistently admired over the years is Carolyn Slaughter. Of her eleven published works I have read seven: The Story of the Weasel, Magdalene, Dreams of the Kalahari, The Banquet, A Perfect Woman, The Innocents, and Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood. I have two more on my bookshelf (Dresden, Tennessee and A Black Englishman) waiting to be read.

I discovered The Banquet in a second-hand store in Hamilton, Ontario where I was living at the time.

For months Harold watches and admires Blossom before he finds the courage to approach her…

Between them develops a rapport at first exquisite and fragile, and then deepening to a consuming passion. Gradually Blossom realizes that this is forever and that Harold has chosen her for something quite extraordinary. Propelled by an obsession both painful and terrifying, Blossom and Harold are swept towards the affair’s horrifying climax.

Okay, yes, I was going through my obsessive love phase – what twenty-something hasn’t been there, done that? But the quality of Slaughter’s prose was just…so amazingly beautiful. Harold was such a sympathetic character and Blossom so lovely; their story was mesmerizing, right until that shocking ending.

After I read The Banquet I went looking for more of her work and came to discover that she wasn’t so easy to find. I found her novel The Story of the Weasel at The Strand in NYC and devoured it. The story of siblings who fall in love is tragic and perhaps one of the greatest love stories I have ever read. Over the years I’ve tracked down her other work and I have continued to be amazed at the genius of her prose, her understanding of human nature, her fearlessness.

She is the recipient of my one and only fan letter to a writer. I wrote it back in the 80s and she responded: two and a half hand-written pages which I cherish.