Gone Readin'

It's over 90 degrees here in my little burb outside the big city. The sun is shining, the tulip magnolias, cherry trees, and weeping cherries are in full bloom and the dogwoods have fat, juicy buds.

Mr. Pom ran out and swept the screened porch and bought us a new sisal rug. Then we tried to buy porch furniture that we couldn't afford from a store that couldn't be bothered talking to us because we were looking, I guess, at the cheapest line.

So since they didn't want our humongous sum of money for wicker, I left and came home and bought a set for the third of the price (15% off!/no  shipping!) from Tarjay. I will probably have to recover the cushions, but who cares!

Then we came home and I sat in the driveway on my beach chair and pretended I was at Nauset. I was good so  long as I kept my eyes shut.

But I couldn't keep them shut for long because I am reading this.

Do I like it? I can't decide whether to read it or have it bronzed/read it or have it hung permanently around my neck like a talisman/read it or weep/read it or have babies with it.

Oh, it hasn't been released in the states yet. You have to get it from amazon.ca. (Like that would stop me).

It is astonishing, as one reviewer said. It involves the coming of age of the generation before 1914, in the last of the "Edwardian summer", and revolves around Olive, a fairy tale writer who large, complicated, and interesting family lives in the country surrounded by other large, complicated families, whose children run freely in country manors with names like "Todefright" and in the woods, and interact with Fabians and Russians and puppeteers and great ceramicists.

I honestly don't know whether to take off three days from work, plump up the pillows, make large pots of tea, and read it all in one glorious swoon, or limit myself to one page a day for 600 days so I can feel as if it will never end.

Here is the synopsis of the novel from Good Reads:

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead. In their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children's book.

I will be writing more about it as I read on. I am going back to begin again as there are many characters and I keep losing myself in the rich, full lyrical passages that describe the lanterns they make for the Midsummer's Eve party, or the costumes that the maiden aunt sews from discarded ballgowns, or, oh my heart!!! the private books, bound in different colors and kept on a locked shelf, that Olive writes and illustrates for each child!