FAMILY TIME
Last week, the Chief Penguin and I spent several days in North Carolina. The primary reason was to attend my niece’s wedding in Durham. This was also a rare opportunity for a family gathering. Two young nieces participated as flower girls and loved their flower wands! My three siblings and spouses were there as well as many of the next generation. We don’t all get together often so it was special.
The only disappointment was the lack of our son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters. Their flight from New York was cancelled, one of the casualties of Ophelia’s torrential rains and flooding. They were sorely missed!
BOOK OF THE WEEK
The Bookbinder by Pip Williams
Novelist Pip Williams, a Londoner by birth, lives in Australia, but her two historical novels are set in and around Oxford, England. I loved The Dictionary of Lost Words, a novel about the creation of definitions for a comprehensive English dictionary. Esme helps her father in the shed sorting and organizing slips of paper with words and suggested definitions. On the sly, she begins collecting and creating word slips that refer to women, their bodies, slang terms for females, and the like.
In The Bookbinder, twins Peggy and Maude, work at Oxford University Press in the bindery department. Devoid of means, they live on a narrowboat and spend their days gathering and folding the parts of a book and then stitching them together. It’s a repetitive job and Peggy seeks more. Their deceased mother had also worked there. She and Peggy amassed a collection of assorted foldings on their boat. When she can, Peggy reads parts of the pages at work and at home.
It’s 1914 and with the men going off to war and then returning home injured, there are new opportunities for women. Peggy volunteers to visit and read or write letters to these soldiers. On the ward, she meets Bastian, a Belgian who has been disfigured in the fighting. Her association with Bastian is both fulfilling and stimulating, but her real dream would be to attend Somerville College. How the lives of Peggy, Maude, Bastian, and their friends Gwen, Jack, and Tilda, unfold through the war years, is in part a leisurely stroll through the world of books and letters.
Williams’ novels are well researched. This one about women’s work in the bindery came about because of a small, discovered-by-chance reference to a bindery girl in an archive. The numerous details about the specifics of creating a book might cause some readers to get bogged down, but I found the whole process fascinating as well as the particulars of the tomes they were binding.
Williams dedicates herself to rendering women’s daily experiences, in this case during WWI. But the novel is also Peggy’s story of aspirations and dreams set against her growing love for Bastian. Highly recommended! (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header image of twirling flower girls by JWFarrington.
