B. Morrison's Blog

The Real Mrs. Miniver, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

We’ve seen the movie, of course, and thought it a sentimental film about a woman who is practically perfect in every way keeping her family together and holding the home front together during the Blitz—the bombing of London during WWII. The book the film is based on, a collection of columns from the London Times, was something else altogether: an idealised portrait of an ordinary upper middle class woman’s life in pre-WWII England.

Those ...

This unusual Young Adult (YA) novel is perfect end-of-October reading: stark, a little sad and a lot spooky. Part graphic novel and part journal, it’s a stunning portrayal of what many people experience, especially those on the tender, unpredictable cusp of adolescence.

Lonely Ella has just moved to town, her modern-day story told in striking black-and-white graphics, the only words being those occasionally written on items in the scene. We see an upstairs room, packing boxes, a window—an...

Frankie McGrath, a naïve 23-year-old “California girl” and nursing student, enlists in the Army Nurse Corps because it is the branch of the military that will send her to Vietnam as quickly as possible. It’s 1965, and she has an idealistic vision of meeting up with her brother who is deployed there.

Unsurprisingly, once there she’s overwhelmed by the difference between her dreams and reality. The author recreates the day-to-day chaos and destruction of a medical station during the Vietnam...

I’ve been rereading Eliot’s classic novel this month with Haley Larsen’s Closely Reading group on Substack. It’s been a few decades since I last read it, and different features of the book leaped out at me this time.

The story is about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Middlemarch in the English Midlands around 1830. Eliot does a masterful job of zooming in to a dozen or so characters while giving other townspeople plenty to space to make themselves known.

We first meet Dorothea Brooke...

When the Oxford Junior Dictionary was updated, it was found that around forty common words had been dropped—all of them words to do with nature—and their place taken by words, many of which have to do with the online world.

In response, MacFarlane and Morris came together to create what they call a spell book to help young readers rediscover the natural world. Unless we experience and learn to love the world of nature around us, we will not work to save it.

In this large-format book, w...

While rainy weather sends most people indoors, Harrison suggests that “if you only ever go out on sunny days you only see half the picture, and remain somehow untested and callow.”

In this quiet gem of a book, she takes us on four walks in the rain in different parts of England. In January we visit Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire; Shropshire in April; the Darent Valley in Kent in August; and Devon’s Dartmoor in October. Different landscapes, different seasons, yet all of them reveal how our worl...

Little is known of Lucy Walter whose son James was the oldest child of King Charles II. From those few facts, Goudge has spun an entrancing story of a vibrant girl whose great love for the prince—whose father ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as King Charles I—lasted a lifetime. We first meet Lucy as a child in Wales, where she lived with her family in Roch Castle and thought herself part buccaneer, roaming the countryside experiencing all of creation with a dazzling joy.

It was then she...

Imogen Quy is a nurse at St. Agatha’s College in Cambridge University. Working part-time gives her the freedom to enjoy other activities like quilting, which is where the story begins. She and two friends must choose a pattern and fabric for a quilt that will eventually be raffled off for the Red Cross funds. This seemingly unimportant activity foreshadows what’s coming in this smart mystery.

The three have different ideas for a quilt pattern: one wants something simple and basic while an...

This has been my month for virtual travel: from a remote Finnish island to southern Virginia to Tuscany and London. Now this recently republished novel from 1931 takes me to East Anglia, a part of England I love, where we move between Cambridge and a manor in Suffolk.

Prudence Pinsent, a thoroughly modern woman in her thirties, lives with her father, the Master of (fictional) Prince’s College and a retired bishop. In her role as his hostess she’s perfectly proper but “she reserved to hers...

Tuscany, August, 1944. Taking a walk after lunch, Evelyn Skinner sees a jeep and waves it down. As an art historian with decades of experience, she’s in Italy to help with the artworks from museums and churches that have been hidden in the hills during the war, identifying them and assessing the damage. She asks the young English soldier driving the jeep, Private Ulysses Temper, to help her contact the Allied Military Government.

Even in this brief scene, these two people capture the imaginat...