Mara Kay

My copy (Storm Warning, published by Beaver Books) has the worst cover art ever. Relevant because it took me over a year, maybe two years, to get past it and actually read the book. It's a pretty good adventure story, set in Frankfurt, Germany in 1938. A young English girl and her journalist uncle are delayed in getting out of the country when they have an automobile accident, and while Uncle Dick is recovering in hospital, Ann becomes involved with the troubles of her local host family and the two Jewish refugee children hiding in the attic. Sometimes a little too much fortuitous coincidence, but gives a good overview of how things were at that point in time. Still going to have to get rid of the zombie Hitler Youth cover though.… (more)

Another childhood favorite. Sequel to Masha, and I was randomly compelled to re-read them both recently. They hold up well. This book has much more history than the first. It's about the 1825 Decembrist uprising (one of the lesser-known and much less successful Russian revolutions; very much like the group in Les Miserables) and includes many real-life figures as characters. Not much is known about the author, who was originally from Russia, but I'm guessing she was White Russian aristocracy. The sympathy is all with the royals rather than the rebels. It's an unusual angle, but still an interesting one. The love triangle is transparent but some of the friendships are remarkably layered.… (more)

This was one of my favorite books as a kid. I recently remembered it for some random reason and thought it was interesting that it had gone out of print. Somehow that made me want to reread it. It's actually still quite good. It's a boarding school story and I always loved those. The history is woven in rather than going off in lecture tangents, which is a mixed blessing -- you don't get dragged out of the story but you don't learn all that much of substance. It was really interesting to notice how they'd just finished fighting Napoleon (several of the students had lost their fathers in battle and Waterloo occurs partway through the book) but everyone still spoke French instead of Russian and hired French tailors and teachers. It was more realistic than some modern stories in that you basically just get their day to day routines, with no adventures and with plenty of petty squabbling. I don't think you could sell that now. The abrupt, left field ending could have used more explanation. Time to ILL the sequel, which I also read repeatedly.… (more)