Today we have another booktuber recommendation, this time from a newly discovered booktuber. She talked about a number of English women authors from the turn of the last century to its mid-point. Writers the like of Miss Read, D E Stevenson, and Molly Clavering, all of whom I have read and enjoyed.
However, this time around, we have a new such author. How will she stack up?
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Olivia (AKA Olivia in India) by O Douglas A
This book was just what I was looking for. Indeed, I had been exploring my options both from the library and on Kindle to find some new British women authors' fiction, which includes some of my favorite authors, and whose work I haven't exhausted. And so when I came across a video talking about ten such authors. So here we are.
This is an account of several months Olivia Douglas spends visiting her government official brother during the Indian cool season. It is written as a series of letters to a good friend/lover back in England. It recounts the voyage, the people she meets, the sights she sees, and the experience of India from the point of view of an British woman prior to World War One, i.e. it is mostly a view of the thin veneer of English rule over the vast subcontinent.
I've now read a number of stories set broadly in this period, and find them fascinating for some reason. So much so that I am considering trying to capture whatever it is about India under the British Rah in a speculative fiction novel. No promises, just thinking. In this account, as I said, she talks mostly about the people she meets as she travels across India along with her brother. This is not a story about the Indian people, rather it is of the English living and ruling India.
O Douglas is the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, who is the younger sister of John Buchan of The 39 Steps fame, an old favorite author of mine, and it is based on a trip she made to India to visit one of her other Buchan brother, so it is probably an edited version of her actual experiences in India, an authentic account of the slice of life she chose to describe.
She is best membered, if she is at all for a series of domestic focused novels set in the Peeblesshire in the low lands of Scotland. I came across her on Jen's Reading Life YouTube channel in a video featuring ten British women authors prior to the 1950's, which, as I mentioned in the lede, included old favorites like Miss Reed, Molly Cavering, and D E Stevenson, as well as several others that I've read. And it just so happens that a ten novel collection of O Douglas's novels was available on Amazon, and on sale as well. So for the princely price of $.99 I have ten of her novels to explore. I hope that they will prove as interesting in their own way as this rather exotic account did. She can write... and that's more than half the battle for me. You can expect to see more book reports on O Douglas's novel in the future. Hopefully, for months in the future. I have nine left to read.
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