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snurri ([personal profile] snurri) wrote2010-02-25 12:52 pm
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2010 Reading #18: Early Candlelight by Maud Hart Lovelace

Books 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore.
15. Fredrick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861-1912 by Paul D. Nelson.
16. Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley.
17. East by Edith Pattou.

18. Early Candlelight by Maud Hart Lovelace. I never read the Betsy-Tacy books, myself, but yes, this is that Maud Hart Lovelace. She was from Minnesota, as it turns out; my interest in this particular novel--her first--is that it's an historical, set in the area of Fort Snelling in the late 1830s. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting a lot (I mean, just look at that cover), and so I was surprised to find that it wasn't a bad book. It was published in 1929, so it's not what you'd call racially sensitive, and there's certainly a pride-in-Manifest-Destiny thing going on. But there's a gleeful depiction of the voyageurs here, and a romance that's unexpectedly modern, at least in parts. Lovelace is also strong on the sort of physical/domestic details that I appreciated in East, something which her contemporary critics were apparently less than enamored with. I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who wasn't already interested in the history of this area, but given that I was going to read it anyway I was happy to find it more than readable.

[identity profile] mrissa.livejournal.com 2010-02-25 09:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Betsy of the Betsy-Tacy books is a remarkable balance for her time. She is strongly interested in a writing career but also popular with boys (and girls, but that's less rare). When I was rereading them as an adult, I found the "I don't want to choose, I want both" idea surprisingly modern considering how much I remembered about apple-peeling fortune-telling games and contemporary slang of the time.