Last Train To London, by Meg Waite Clayton, was recommended by my mom and took me back to one of my first loves, historical fiction around the time of World War II.
This book is huge, and it took me a while to get into it. I had to get used to jumping in between the different plot lines that are braided together in the story, and honestly, I’m short on time and get intimidated by huge books. But soon, I couldn’t stop reading.
The Remarkables, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, was sitting in the middle grade section of our library on an open shelf. The teaser phrase on the cover reads, “There’s a mystery next door.”
There was something compelling and a little spooky about the cover art. With a little hesitation, because I don’t like to be spooked, I grabbed it.
It took several weeks to get to – the reading list is so long these days. But it was SO. GOOD.
Our evening streetwalk in Saratoga Springs was easy to write about because it went so well. We got dropped off by the shuttle bus, walked down the wide street on one side, and back up the other. We got back just in time to catch the last shuttle to our parking lot. And the whole thing was really, really fun.
The Troy Stroll was different.
The Serpent King, by Jeff Zentner, is the second book I read for the YA Book Club I joined at my library. (The last book I read for the book club was The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black).
I started The Serpent King at a tender time. I was spending a second weekend at the bedside of my grandmother, who was dying. Many of my most vivid memories of my time spent at her home were from my teenage years, when my friendships with my cousins were one of the most important things in my life and the summer visits, full of new experiences, were larger than life.
The house itself is full of senior photos of the cousins and grandkids, all of us gathered on shelves and side tables, frozen in time as 17 and 18-year-olds, and the home’s interior has barely changed over the course of the time I visited there from childhood until I was an adult.
When I first posted about the Victorian Strolls I was getting ready for, I had plenty of ideas but hadn’t done much other than internet research. Once I got into the actual construction, things got labor intensive, but it was so fun. Click through to see how I dressed each person in the family and where we found the costume pieces.
