Miss Jaster's Garden

 Oh how I love this book! Not only does it showcase an adorable, garden growing hedgehog (Be still my heart!) but it takes place in a seaside town and has a MAP on the flyleaf (also called the frontispiece). A adore book that have maps on the flyleaf page. I adore books that have a map on the flyleaf pages! I adore books that..... OK. Sorry. Got carried away. But really.



    Here is the Purple House Press intro to the book:

Hedgie the hedgehog lives in a little corner of Miss Jaster's garden. One morning nearsighted Miss Jaster mistakenly plants some seeds on Hedgie, who is asleep in the flowerbed. Before Hedgie knows it, flowers have sprouted among the quills on his back! It's the happiest day of Hedgie's life, his feet begin doing little dance steps and before you know it Hedgie dances out beyond the gate.
When Miss Jaster thinks she sees her flowers walking by themselves, she calls the constable. Will Hedgie ever be able to return to the garden he loves?
Originally published in 1972, Miss Jaster's Garden is a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book.

Oh, and also: If you've never checked out Purple House Press, it is amazing!

Anne of Green Gables

   Well, as usually happens when I delve in, I immediate had to research some tidbit that I read. This time: Cotton Warp Quilts. I've wondered about them before. Mrs. Lynde finds time to churn them out all while "keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed." 

    About every four years or so I reread the entire "Anne" series by Lucy Maud Montgomery. It is a well tented ritual that I look forward too. I generally have to wait for the urge to come upon me to begin it at the beginning AGAIN. For some unexplained reason, this tends to happen in the Spring. 

   Today, I delved into Anne of Green Gables with relish. During a recent trip to my parents farm, I repossessed all my old paperback copies of the series and also the short stories, the stand-alones, and the Emily and Pat series. Some of the books are missing covers and backs. Some look as though they were left out in the rain. They all have that particular Bantam cheap paper smell from the 1970's publications.
   Just sleuthing google didn't turn up much. I wanted photos, not descriptions. I wanted to visualize the material grasped in Rachel's hands. And then, I found this post over at LadynThread. Oh, my. She is incredible, this women. Her blog post is extremely well researched and concise. It leaves no questions unturned. I won't be able to do justice to her research by condensing it here, so you much go THERE to check it out.

Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Bittersweet

      by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

     On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful, wild, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century; it’s the kind of place where children twirl sparklers across the lawn during cocktail hour. Mabel falls in love with midnight skinny-dipping, the wet dog smell that lingers near the yachts, and the moneyed laughter that carries across the still lake while fireworks burst overhead. Before she knows it, she has everything she’s ever wanted: friendship, a boyfriend, access to wealth, and, most of all, for the first time in her life, the sense that she belongs.

But as Mabel becomes an insider, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact - and what they might do to anyone who threatens them. Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family’s dark secrets and make Ev’s world her own. Suspenseful and cinematic, Bittersweet exposes the gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider’s hunger to belong. ---Goodreads

 It took me a while to get into this book. Once I did, I was hooked like a fish on a line. There were parts that made me burn with shame as if I had done just what Mabel had. There were parts that made me squirm in embarrassment and also shock. But the secrets that come out in the end are what really made me come away from this novel feeling as if I just digested a scorpion. Nostalgic and slightly elusive is this novel. A great read.