Cheltenham Literature Festival 2018

October 10, 2018 / Eleanor Jane / 2 Comments

I am just back from my first ever visit to the Cheltenham Literature Festival where I had the best time. The whole festival village was amazing and there were three separate festival bookshops – one of them dedicated to children’s books. I was in heaven.

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I was there for a long weekend and in that time managed to fit in ten events. It was wonderful to find so many fascinating talks – Sarah Dunant’s on the Borgias was especially interesting (and entertaining, as all the best talks should be).

My favourite events were on the Saturday afternoon. Two talks about children’s books which were brilliant and after which I got to meet Anna James – author of Tilly and the Book Wanderers – and Jessica Townsend – author of Nevermoor. They were both lovely people (and their books are wonderful too – go and read them!).

To round off the evening we went along to the lit crawl to take part in the quiz. It had a classics theme which I obviously loved and we managed to come third which made me very proud, especially as we were the smallest team there. We received some fabulous prizes too, including two books – Frankenstein and La Belle Sauvage – and four tickets to festival events. I practically danced my way back to the hotel!

One of the best things about any festival is the amount of reading time. There were plenty of lovely places to sit and my favourite was the Book Stand – a cosy sitting room set up on the band stand. I spent some very happy hours there with my book and a cup of tea.

It was a brilliant weekend and I would definitely love to visit again.

Visiting Agatha Christie

August 29, 2018August 29, 2018 / Eleanor Jane / 2 Comments

I am just back from a week’s holiday in Dartmouth. I had a lovely, restful time and got to do a lot of reading.

No trip to Dartmouth would be complete without a visit to Agatha Christie’s house Greenway. She described it as, ‘The loveliest place in the world,’ and it really is beautiful. You can see that the views when she lived there must have been amazing, although the trees have grown up a bit now and obscure the view somewhat.

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Some of the nicest things about the house are the bookshelves. A great many National Trust houses have libraries which are filled with books bought by the yard – all matching and never read. The books here were completely mismatched and looked very well read which made me so happy. There were naturally many different editions of Agatha Christie’s own books and I fell in love with this little bookcase on the landing. I want one!

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Perhaps my favourite thing though was the drawer of imaginatively addressed envelopes which found their way to the house.

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Of these, I was especially fond of this one which is just wonderful.

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Of course, we had to walk down to the boathouse which features so prominently in Dead Man’s Folly. We had been listening to the audio book on the way down to Dartmouth and I finished it after our visit. I have read it before but it was fascinating to read it again and be able to picture the scene exactly.

Once in the boathouse we spent a long time watching the river from the balcony. It is such a peaceful spot and it is a lovely place to sit. There is a fireplace inside so I should think it would be wonderfully cosy in winter too. Whilst there I also got to sit in Agatha Christie’s own chair – it was made especially for her and she used to sit in it to look over her manuscripts. One couldn’t read anything but Dead Man’s Folly there and there was a handy copy lying on the chair with a useful label pointing me to the relevant pages.

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We left by ferry and so walked down to the quay through the woods – the shortcut which so infuriated Sir George Stubbs. It was a lovely day and I’m sure I will be back again in the future.

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Book Review – ‘Theatrical’ by Maggie Harcourt

August 19, 2018 / Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

I don’t read a great many young adult books. Partly I think because I don’t remember my local libraries or bookshops having young adult sections when I was a teenager. I assume they had them but I just completely skipped them.

Sometimes though, a YA book screams at me to read it and it is only polite to do so. Last year one of those books was Maggie Harcourt’s Unconventional which I loved – if you haven’t read it already then I highly recommend it. At the time I said that it reminded me why I love reading so much.

Therefore, when I saw that Maggie Harcourt had a new book coming out I was very excited indeed. I was lucky enough to be sent a reading copy of Theatrical by Usborne and I could not have been happier.

Publisher’s Blurb
Hope dreams of working backstage in a theatre, and she’s determined to make it without the help of her famous costume-designer mum. So when she lands an internship on a major production, she tells no one. But with a stroppy Hollywood star and his hot young understudy upstaging Hope’s focus, she’s soon struggling to keep her cool…and her secret.

I was captivated by this one straight away – the first scene is just wonderful – and I was so pleased to be back in Maggie’s world. I also loved the fact that it ties in with Unconventional.

I thought the book had a great storyline and I very much enjoyed reading it. The best thing for me though was how invested I was in the characters. I have read several books recently – mainly ones chosen for my book club – where I have just not engaged with the characters at all so I didn’t really care what happened to them and thus wasn’t driven to keep reading. I definitely wanted to keep reading this one! I even found myself getting quite emotional as the first night performance was about to start. A few tears may have been shed.

I very much identified with Hope, the main character. There were several times when I paused my reading because she expresses how I feel so well. Moments like this: ‘I can almost feel the quiet seeping into my skin like a dye, a drug. I will always be chasing this; this exact silence, because this is the only place I can find it.’

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book and I will definitely be looking out for the next one.