Six Degrees: Ghost Stories to A Brief History of Montmaray

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz and A Good Book and a Cup of Tea hosted at Boondock Ramblings.

This month the starting point is Ghost Cities by Siang Lu which was recently announced as the winnter of the 2025 Mile Franklin Literary Award here in Australia. I haven't read it, and I don't think I am likely too, but that doesn't mean that I can't make a chain from it!

A book I read earlier this year that featured a house that was haunted by ghosts was Lauren Westwood's The House of Light and Shadows. (my review)

I do love it when a house is almost a character in a book. In The Briar Club by Kate Quinn Briarwood House is a character in it's own right, telling part of the story. I listened to this book on audio recently and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The next book I listened to on audio was Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby van Pelt which also featured an unusual character - a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus. I loved the voice of Marcellus in the audiobook so I am really pleased to hear that the same actor is going to be the voice in the upcoming movie version too! 

There are remarkably few books with the word remarkably in the title (at least in my reading lists) but there is Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier which is about a woman who was a fossil collector.

Which leads me nicely to The Fossil Hunter by Tea Cooper.

Choosing the final book was actually a bit harder, as there were almost too many directions I could choose from but in the end I went with the surname of Cooper and chose A Brief History of Montmoray by Michelle Cooper

Next month, the starting point is Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything.

Will you be joining us?

Six Degrees of Separation: From I Capture the Castle to The Fatal Shore

 

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz. 

 

This months starting point is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, which is the diary of Cassandra Mortmain.

I instantly thought of a book but I couldn't remember the name of the book, I had no idea why I thought it would connect to the starting book, and I only had a vague idea that the author's first name was Michelle. Eventually I figured it all out out, thank goodness. The book is called A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper.  This is a book which tells the story of the royal family of an imaginary kingdom. The family lives on a small island in a crumbling castle in the mid 1930sand the story is told through the diary of Princess Sophie. And it turns out both of these books have been released as Vintage Children's Classics.

For my next step I am choosing Australian historical fiction author Tea Cooper. There are any number of her books I could choose but I guess I have to pick one which is.......The Cedar Cutter.

In the end I could have chosen any of her books because I am choosing my next link in the chain based on the word Tea. My next choice is The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly. This is the first book in the Tea Rose trilogy set in Victorian London. I was very excited to see an email from this author this week to say that she is releasing a new short story set in this world! Yes!!

This made me think of other novella's I have read so my next book is The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe which is a reimagining of a short story by W Somerset Maughan. This was a book I featured in a Weekend Cooking post a number of years ago, and it was winner of the Seizure Viva La Novella Prize back in 2017. It is set in Dutch Colonial Indonesia

I tried to think of other books set in Indonesia. There was one that came to mind but it was one I would rather not feature, so instead I am choosing Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw.

My final choice is another with a map on the cover, The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. 

Next month's starting point is 

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, which is a novella that has been nominated for the Booker prize

Christmas Quotes: A Montmaray Christmas

Today's quote comes from pages 140-141 of A Brief History of Montmaray and is a quote from the main character's diary.

What else? Oh, Christmas. Well, Aunt Charlotte must have insisted Toby spend it with her. So much for Veronica's Christmas pudding wish - or mine, come to that. I'm pretty sure Simon spent Christmas at Aunt Charlotte's, too. As for us, we tried to put on a cheerful front for Henry's sake, but she was too miserable to appreciate it. To be honest, even I felt my festive spirits evaporate when I went to look for the box of decorations and found they'd been stored directly under a leaky part of the nursery ceiling. Toby's cardboard angels, my tissue-paper snowflakes, a dozen years worth of paper chains - all reduced to a sodden gray pulp. Even the gold-painted pine-cones seemed to have sprouted mould. And it was raining too hard to contemplate gathering any flowers or greenery outside, not that there's much about at this time of year anyway.

In the end, I followed the example of an arty governess we had a few years ago and set up a tall twisted bit of driftwood in the kitchen, with shells strung from the branches on pieces of leftover knitting wool. Henry contributed an angel she'd carved from a cuttlefish shell. And Veronica and Rebecca managed to cook Christmas dinner together without any major catastrophes. We had roast chicken stuffed with herbs, glazed ham and all the vegetables Henry could salvage from the waterlogged garden. The pudding was... well, it had a very interesting texture. Henry dropped her slice on the floor and it bounced. I think we boiled it too long. But Julia and the rest of the Stanley-Rosses had very kindly sent us a hamper stuffed full of mince pies and nuts and preserved fruit, so we had that instead. Afterwards Rebecca made egg-nog and I read A Christmas Carol aloud by the stove, while Veronica fixed the leaky tap over the sink and Henry mended a rip in her best fishing set. Uncle John stayed in his room throughout, of course, but the door was ajar, so it was almost as though he was there, too. So it wasn't such a terrible Christmas, after all.

A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper

I first remember hearing about the Montmaray books over at Danielle's blog. There's a certain irony when you find out about books by Australian authors at an American blog, but these things happen! It sounded like my kind of read and so when I was given the opportunity to read it (because it has recently been rereleased here as a Vintage Children's Classic) this seemed like a good time to read the book for myself.

The book is told in diary format with the author of the diary being a young girl name Sophie, or more correctly Princess Sophie of Montmaray and covers the months towards the end of 1936. Once Montmaray was a small but flourishing island nation but the Great War and the subsequent Spanish flu has decimated the population. Now there are only a few villagers who live on the isolated island, struggling to make a living. Of the royal family, Sophie and her sister Henrietta live in the 'castle' along with their cousin Veronica and their uncle King John who is a shadowy character on the edge of their lives who seems to be dealing with some form of madness. The heir to the throne, Sophie's brother Toby, is living in England, going to school and mixing with the best in society. He is accompanied by the housekeeper's son, Simon, who also has suddenly become the focus of Sophie's daydreams.

For quite a while, the diary entries reflect day to day events of what essentially is life in a crumbling castle on a big rock in the middle of the ocean. The people of the island rely on passing boats to communicate with the outside world. If they need a doctor they have to hoist a specific flag to the top of the flagpole and wait for one of the passing boats to stop and offer up assistance. Sophie's younger sister Henry is a tomboy who refuses to sit down and be educated. The castle is falling apart so there are leaking roofs, dwindling supplies and more. All of those worries become somewhat less important when two German soldiers land at the island, looking for a specific artifact that may or may not be connected to the island nation. In the space of just a couple of days, absolutely everything changes for the people who call Montmaray home. The final third of the book morphs into a bit of an adventure story as there is danger and intrigue and just a touch of romance that it is very subtly implied.

Whilst this book covers a lot of ground historically, it is not straight historical fiction. The island nation of Montmaray is fictional and so therefore are the majority of the characters and the role that Montmaray plays in European history. Having said that, Cooper covers a lot of historical ground with mentions including Henry VIII,  Napoleon and the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany along with lots of other historical figures and events. The mix between real events and made up is really well handled and in this new edition there are notes to help young readers know what is real and what isn't.

When a book is well written using the diary format, it is a thing of joy. All too often a diary format can feel restrictive in terms of view point and narrative. In this case, the diary format works primarily thanks to the voice of Sophie which is engaging and charming from beginning to end.

I was trying to fit this book in around other reads and so was intending to read a chapter a day. There were plenty of days though when I ended up reading more than one chapter as this book was more engaging than the other book I was reading!

I was charmed by the characters, setting and historical context, so I will be very much looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with the royal family of Montmaray sooner rather than later!

Rating 4/5

Thanks to the author who supplied a copy of the book for review. She also guest posted for us at Historical Tapestry, telling us why she loves to read and write about 1930's England.

Synopsis

'This is what happened tonight, every single terrible thing that I can remember . . .'

Sophie FitzOsborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray, along with her tomboy younger sister Henry, her beautiful, intellectual cousin Veronica, and Veronica's father, the completely mad King John.When Sophie receives a leather journal for her sixteenth birthday, she decides to write about her life on the island. But it is 1936 and bigger events are on the horizon. Is everything Sophie knows and loves about the change?

This book counted for the following challenges