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Tag: go off to live

The New Moon with the Old, Dodie Smith

Ordinarily I only ever read this book when I have just finished I Capture the Castle and I need my Dodie Smith fix to continue.  It’s really not the most fantastic book you’ve ever seen, but it’s rather charming.  I am susceptible to its charms even when I know the entire book is totally far-fetched and these things would never ever happen. The book is about the Carrington family, whose father goes on the run for vague and unspecified money-type crimes, just after he has engaged a secretary/housekeeper type, Jane Minton, who plans like Thoroughly Modern Millie to marry her…

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Three books about dumb kids

Just finished reading three books I’d been looking forward to, and none of them wholly pleased me. What I Was, Meg Rosoff – All about a boy called Hilary (bless) who goes to a British boarding school and becomes a bit obsessed with another young boy called Finn, who lives by himself in a little hut that can only be reached during low tide.  I thought the revelation about Finn at the end was a bit of a let-down, since the rest of the book didn’t at all seem a revelation-type book.  Besides which I do not appreciate stories in…

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How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff

I will preface this by saying that I liked this book a lot.  However, due to that habit I have of forming expectations when I read about things, it was also not at all what I thought it was going to be.  Because I forgot about the whole second half of Nymeth’s review or something, but the only thing that stuck with me was a girl goes off to live with her cousins (there is really no phrase I find more appealing in a book synopsis than goes off to live with) and I had a vague sense that they…

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Carrie’s War, Nina Bawden

Recommended by: GeraniumCat’s great big list of children’s books you should have read as a kid Nothing as appealing as people mentioning things that you might have missed but they hope you haven’t.  Unfortunately most of the books on the list weren’t at the library on account of, I assume, being wildly out of print and based in the United Kingdom, but I got Carrie’s War.  It’s about two little Blitz evacuee kids (I love books about evacuee kids) who get evacuated to Wales and live with a family and the older girl, Carrie, does a terrible thing. I like…

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