Tag: England
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Book Review: Gilded Youth: A History of Growing Up In the Royal Family: From the Plantagenets to the Cambridges by Tom Quinn
Full disclosure here: I’ve always been fascinated by Britain’s Royal Family. At one point in the not too distant past I had an entire shelf of biographies of members of this family, dating all the way back to Henry VIII and coming forward to multiple books on the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis,…
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Book Review: Elizabeth Sails by Kristin Owens
My husband and I are freshly retired and we are making up for lost time planning vacations since we haven’t been able to travel much over the years. One of the things we are currently debating is whether or not we want to go on a cruise. I’ve been on two, albeit both a very…
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Book Review: Mrs. Porter Calling by A. J. Pearce
One of my favorite books of 2019 was Dear Mrs. Bird by A. J. Pearce, which I read just before the lockdown and the horrible pandemic thing ensued. I love that book so much that my family finally did an intervention and asked me to STOP talking about Emmy and her friends. Since then, I’ve…
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Book Review: Of Manners and Murder: A Dear Hermoine Mystery #1, by Anastasia Hastings
Perusing the NetGalley offerings, this book screamed, “Read me!” Set in Victorian England in 1885? A headstrong female protagonist solving a mystery? Yes, please. As I started reading the first in this new mystery series, I was immediately struck by how Violet reminded me of Eliza Scarlet from the compelling PBS Masterpiece series Miss Scarlet…
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Book Review: The Hygge Holiday by Rosie Blake
For two years I lived in a small town near Brussels, Belgium, and seeking to make friends, I joined an international cooking club. There were twelve members, and we were each assigned a month where we hosted the entire group for lunch, with foods from our own culture. Each month was new and exciting, learning…
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Book Review: The Dig by John Preston (Other Press, 2007)
At some point during the pandemic, my husband and I watched the Netflix original film The Dig (Netflix, 2021) starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan. We were both quite taken with it. I immediately googled it and found that it was based upon a work of historical fiction of the same name by John Preston.…
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Book Review: The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland
You know that feeling when you have a bug bite that has scabbed over and you pick at it and pick at it and make it bleed even though it is hurting and you know that you are making it hurt? That’s sort of the feeling I had while reading Stephanie Butland’s novel The Lost…
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Girl Power
It’s mid-third quarter of this school year and I am knee-deep teaching two novels set in England nearly six hundred years apart. The 7th grade is reading Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, the diary of a girl in medieval times during the reign of Edward I, covering the span of one year of her…
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The Adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It’s halfway through the second quarter of the school year and I’ve finally reached my favorite part of 8th grade literature, the beginning of an extended unit on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. First we read his short story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, which serves as a warm-up to third quarter when we take…
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Read ‘Em or Weep: A Cautionary Tale
All over the country grade school, middle school, and high school students are scrambling to finish their summer reading assignments and projects. Some have put off reading a 300-page book to the very last minute and now finishing it in time to complete the assignment seems a daunting task. In the coming week, which is…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 