Miss Buncle's Book

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If you are looking for a light, comfort read and you like stories about English country life you may want to give this book a try. There is one instance of a tiny sliver of paper at the outer edge of one page being pulled off onto the page before it, obviously far from the print. Delightful, charming, warm, cosy - those are the type of words I would use to describe Miss Buncle's Book. With the wit and charm of a Jane Austen novel and the gossipy, small-town delight of the Flavia de Luce series, Miss Buncle's Book is D. Miss Buncle’s Book was the most popular of her novels because it has a completely original plot and a charming and delightful central character.

Well, Barbara Buncle's efforts to make her finances healthier, in the Thirties Recession, turn her neighbourhood upside down, creating happiness and fury in about equal amounts. The other aspect I loved is that this is a book about “a woman writing a novel about a woman writing a novel”. She doesn’t need to invent a thing, although she does produce a pied piper who gets some of her neighbours moving!When Miss Buncle's book is accepted and printed, the village of Silverstream is in an uproar over who this "John Smith" could be who knows them all so well. For example, in the book Major Waterfoot might propose marriage to a neighbor he secretly is fond of. Miss Buncle's quiet little English village of Silverstream is therefor turned into the village of Cooperfield and the residents of Silverstream become thinly veiled characters in Miss Buncle's book, Disturber of the Peace.

If you want to read a cute/funny, charmingly delightful book, pick up Miss Buncle's Book and devote an afternoon to reading. If you've read the book--the scene where a meeting was held to figure out who John Smith was--I die! Obviously this is not everyone's cup of tea, but is was definitely mine and I shall read further adventures of Miss Buncle with unadulterated pleasure. There are some serious moments, for example when the doctor’s children are, very briefly, kidnapped (as a way of trying to force their mother to admit that she wrote the book; which she did not).Which would be cool enough on its own, but it buries all of that under an entertaining style and pitch-perfect characterization that held me firmly in its grasp from beginning to end. Abbott had never before read a novel about a woman who wrote a novel about a woman who wrote a novel—it was like a recurring decimal, he thought, or perhaps even more like a perspective of mirrors such as tailors use, in which the woman and her novel were reflected back and forth to infinity.

Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. But the seriousness is minimal – mostly this is an entirely light-hearted, easy read, one of those books like Mariana, Miss Pettigrew, The Making of a Marchioness and Greenery Street which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent.The characters leap to life, distinguishing themselves in one way or another, and slowly but surely move along this multilayered story. They were after her now like a pack of hounds, but they didn’t know that the fox was in the very midst of them, under their very noses, disguised as one of themselves – it was a piquant situation and Mr Abbott fully appreciated it.

The penciled date and a penciled name on the blank front end paper represent the only writing to be found anywhere. E. (Dorothy Emily) Stevenson (1892–1973), had an enormously successful (and lucrative) writing career, despite her parents’ disapproval of her efforts; she sold four million books in Britain and three million in the States.

Her money is drying up—as it is for many of her neighbors—and she has written a novel to rescue herself from poverty.