THE SATURDAY BOOK REPORT
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.
Penny Plain by O Douglas B
This is O Douglas' third novel of 1920. In this story we have Jean, age 23 raising her two brothers on her own. The eldest is just going off to Oxford at the start of the story, leaving somewhat younger brother, as well as the son of her step-mother. England at this time sent her sons and their wives off to the East, to India, where they routinely died. I gather that it was customary to send the children of the British Rah, once they reached a certain age, back to England to be raised by relatives or lodged in boarding schools. In this case, Jean and her brothers were sent to an old aunt. When the aunt died, Jean was left to raise her siblings. But that's not all. With Jean's mother dead, her father remarried and had a son. He proceeded to die as well, to be followed by his second wife, who, on her deathbed, set their son back to England for Jean to care for, knowing that Jean was a good and caring person.
They live in small cottage in a fictional Scottish boarder town, probably a fictionalized Peebles. Along comes a daughter of a lord, age 40, who sick of society decides to board in the house next door, and she and Jean become close friends. The story slowly evolves mostly to introduce more characters, though there is a late blooming romance as well, that, in its way, reflected certain attitudes of the day. But I can't go into it without spoiling it, so I won't.
Like her previous novels, a lot of this story is taken up with sketches of the local people and their backstories. A lot of the dialog is, well, kindly gossip about everyone, as well as a description of small town life at that time, which I find interesting. It is somewhat eye-opening to read in books written in the past how much people back before radio, TV, and the internet had to make their own entertainment playing games, singing songs, playacting in ad hoc plays, and calling on, or entertaining, neighbors for tea and such. This is contemporary fiction made historical fiction by the passage of time, and depending on how authentic is was at the time, it becomes authentic historical fiction with time. In the case of O Douglas, I don't think she makes her characters out of nothing. I am sure they are drawn, at least in parts, from people she knew or met, having grown up in Scotland, and went on to live in the very part of Scotland that she's writing about.
As usual with her stories, the characters are all likeable, and even the rather unpleasant ones are not without their good side as well. So far I think the stories of Molly Clavering and D E Stevenson are more novel-like (as they should be) than the three stories O Douglas has written at this point. Douglas is more interested in exploring people than in plot, and indeed, sometimes she even slips herself into the story, mentioning that she's telling the story, rather than having it play out on its own.
I'll be reading on. There are seven more novels in the omnibus, but, as I mentioned in the lede, I'm going to take a break. Maybe I'll read something else, or maybe it'll be just a short break. We'll see.
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