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A LITERARY
BLOG ABOUT BOOKS How they affect us. How they shape our lives.
Note: Postings
made when muses strike. Watch for blog alert notices via email, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. "We read to know we are not alone." C.S. Lewis Copyright 2011-2018
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12 Reading Recommendations Please click a book image to purchase it on Amazon.
Novels, books, and musicals June has written and published: Click a book image to purchase it on www.amazon.com
"Meditations
for New Members is a beautifully written little book...a gem. The thoughts are striking and orginal--a
few are quite profound." --Fiona Hodgkin, author of The Tennis Player from Bermuda
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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
British Lit
I
am wholly addicted to "Words with Friends", an online game by Zynga that is very similar to Scrabble©
except that it has a different value square configuration, lower scoring, and more tiles in play that the regular board
game. One of the nifty features of WWF, which I play on my e-reader with five or six friends from all over the country—ten
or fifteen games are concurrently being played at any given time—is the online chat. You can "talk" back and
forth with your, hopefully, friendly opponents as you play.
On Sunday, during one game, a friend in Maine, who
is as avid a player as I am, happened to “chat” that she was on a reading binge. When I asked "What?"
the texted reply came back, "The Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. I am on book two". Hmmmm, I thought. The title and author's name sounded rather intriguing.
And so, between games, always looking for a new author and good book to read, I searched for "Winspear" in my e-reader
supplier's store and, sure enough, there she was with a listing of the nine Maisie Dobbs mystery series novels.
The synopsis of the first book, obviously titled Maisie Dobbs, told of the main character who, in the ten or so years after the end of World War I—"the war
to end all wars"—raised herself by virtue of her "remarkable intelligence" from lowly scullery maid to
being a moderately successful detective. M. DOBBS, the brass plaque on the
entrance to her one-room office reads, TRADE AND PROFESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS.
This seemed to me to smack of both Downton Abbey, the most recent
BBC Masterpiece Theatre offering set in England between 1912 and the end of World War II, and Upstairs, Downstairs, the 1980s long-running BBC series also set in London in the early part of the last
century. Since I absolutely loved the first—having watched it three times—and am currently watching streamed episodes
of the second for the fourth time, I was compelled to at least download the first fifty-six sample pages of Winspear's first
book, just to see if the read and the characters were as equally compelling and intriguing as that of the two BBC-TV stories.
And so, they were. Instantly charmed, I immediately bought the full e-reader version of the book which was first published
in 2003 in hardcover by Soho Press, New York, NY—why didn't I discover Maisie back then, before now? For the past two
days, alternating between WWF games, daily household chores, spurts of cranking out my own novel, and very brief FrankieB
walks in the slowly waning evening heat, I've been immersed in the world of Maisie Dobbs, a staunchly liberated lady of her
times. My kind of woman.
Here is a protagonist that, for sure, I would like to have the chance to meet in real
life. She is a bright, pragmatic, astute purveyor of her chosen art of detective sleuthing—this modern era's mystery
genre's counterpart to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. But, unlike Holmes, I find Dobbs much more intriguing, with
much more of a well-rounded personality. And Winspear, or so it seems from only reading the first part of this, her first
book in the series, is much less predictably formulaic than Doyle. Maisie's cases seem to be, in my mind, much more intricate
and less predictable than Sherlock's. There is, if you will, more afoot and less elementary, my dear reader, about Dobbs.
According to her website at http://jacquelinewinspear.com Winspear did not start out as a prolific mystery writer. Born in Kent, England, she first worked in academic publishing,
in higher education, and in marketing communications in the UK before immigrating to the United States in 1990. While working
in business and as a personal/professional coach, Jacqueline finally embarked upon a life-long dream to be a writer. She has
since, along with creating her novels, been a regular contributor to journals covering international education, has published
articles in women's magazines, and has recorded her essays for KQED radio in San Francisco, where she resides. What prompted
her to write about the adventures and investigations of Maisie Dobbs was two-fold: her deep interest in WWI when her grandfather
was severely wounded and shell-shocked at The Battle of the Somme in 1916, and the haunting image of a tall woman with "bearing"
wearing a 1920s-styled long navy blue woolen skirt and coat. Hence, the "birth" of Maisie Dobbs, "very much
a woman of her generation…com[ing] of age at a time when women took on the toil of men and claimed independence that
was difficult to relinquish."
Winspear has a very distinctive writing style. One in which her words are bright,
crisp, and, with a modicum of flowery descriptive phrases, succinctly depict the scenes in which the relatively fast-paced
action of her novel takes place. It is almost as if she has taken a panoramic photograph and has described it in far less
than the proverbial thousand words. The images of Maisie and her surroundings are focused and clear, leaving little ambiguity
to the reader's imagination. The characters, as well, seen mostly through Maisie's eyes as told in the third-person—a
unique and compelling style that only the most gifted writers can pull off—have depth, and, well, character. Each of them, like Maisie, has that very real spark of humanity that has them almost rising
up out of the pages. They are not just adjuncts to Maisie's story, but are the major bits and pieces, parts and parcels of
all that which makes up this intriguing first tale.
Here is a series that literally arrived on my "doorstep",
if you will, through the virtual portals of a friend's mutual love of the games we play with words and the reading of the
wonderful works that writers weave with them. My friend's suggestion came at time when I am about to quickly finish up the
last four books of the Elm Creek Quilts series and am/was looking for a series to read as equally and as enjoyably mesmerizingly
"cool" to carry me, between my own writing and game-playing adventures, through the long, last half of this hellishly
hot summer. I am sure the nine Maisie Dobbs mystery novels by Jacqueline Winspear will prove to be just what I am looking
for.
And there is no mystery in that.
11:50 am edt
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June
J. McInerney, the host of this Literary Blog, is
an author, poet, and librettist. Her currently published works include a novel, a book of spiritual inspirations,
two
volumes of poetry, stories
for children (of all ages) and
a variety of children's musicals. Her titles include: Miss Elmira's Secret Treasure:
A Novel of Phoenixville during the Early 1900s Colonial Theatre: A Novel of Phoenixville
during the Roarin' 20s Phoenix Hose, Hook & Ladder: A Novel of Phoenixville during
World War I Columbia Hotel: A Novel of Phoenixville during the Early 1900s the Schuylkill Monster: A Novel of Phoenixville in 1978
The Prisoner's
Portrait: A Novel of Phoenxville during World War II
Forty-Thirty Rainbow in the Sky Meditations for New Members
Adventures
of Oreigh Ogglefont The Basset Chronicles. Cats of Nine Tales Spinach
Water: A Collection of Poems Exodus Ending: A
Collection of More Spiritual Poems
We Three Kings Beauty and the Beast Bethlehem Noah's
Rainbow Peter, Wolf, and Red Riding
Hood
Originally from the New York metropolitan area, June currently lives near Valley Forge Park in Pennsylvania with her constant and loving companions, FrankieBernard and Sebastian Cat. She
is currently working on her sixth novel.
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