L.H. Johnson's Blog

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Well known for their first novel, The Far Distant Oxus, written when both Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock were schoolgirls, Crowns is their last effort (I think?) in their joint writing career, published in 1947, and dedicated to the author who began it all for them: Arthur Ransome. It […]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars There’s a lot of incredibly interesting layers to this apparently simple thing and the more you think about it, the more the layers reveal themselves. Esther’s Notebooks is based on a series of conversations between Riad Sattouf and his friend’s daughter, ten year old Esther, about her life and […]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I came across the Puffin edition of this recently and was intrigued, not only at the promise of finally reading Beau Geste after seeing the film, the fact that this copy had been given as a birthday present for “darling Pia” from their “Grampy” which I adore entirely, but […]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I have often thought about the routes that people take towards a text. By this, I mean the routes that people come towards the original story; the way we can experience something, let’s say an Enid Blyton, for example, in a thousand different shapes before ever experiencing the original […]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I had driven for several hours to visit a town in which I used to live. It was there that, with a few minutes to spare, I popped into the second hand bookshop and came out with a crate full of Elsie Oxenhams. Many of them were titles I’d […]

I have an enormous amount of time for what Sally Nicholls does. I’ve just gone through my previous reviews of hers and there’s not a one that I haven’t found something incredibly valuable and resonant within. There’s something in her incredible grace and eloquence that feels so rich for me, and I am eternally happy […]

My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an impossibly eloquent thing. It is the sort of book that you write a thousand sentences for and realise that none of them will ever be enough. So here, let us try and find the enough to describe this. If This Is A Man documents the time […]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars Worrals On The War-Path or The One With All The Moustache Twirling is a lot. But then, all of these books are for me. They’re the sort of books which laugh in the face of restraint and subtlety and instead give you high drama (often rather camp drama) and […]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars I had a long train journey and The Chalet School Wins The Trick was in my bag. It is not the most glamorous of Chalet School books, I think, but it was my read and in a strange way, it was like coming home. There is a comfort here, […]

My rating: 5 of 5 stars For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy revisiting this one. I had come to it with excitement, driven by memories of my first encounter with it a long, long time ago, and yet the first few pages weren’t quite working for me. I couldn’t quite figure […]