I'm not sure if it is just because it is a new year with new beginnings or if my end-of-the-year embargo on starting new books while cleaning up my reading pile in December quite literally cleared my 'reading palate', but I must say it has been some time since I have been so happy with my pile of current reads. Nearly all of them were only just started in January and a couple were vacation treats to dip into in anticipation of 2017. I can pick up any of the books listed on my sidebar and lose myself contentedly in the stories. Nothing feels like a slog and I am excited about each and every book. They all feel so fresh and new, so how perfect that this month's prompt is "A Fresh Start".
I gave myself an easy 'out' when I said in my reading plans that if I didn't like how this was going, if the reading felt like a chore, I would just drop it in favor of something else (or nothing else), but I think not making a list of particular books was a wise idea. Prompts are completely open ended. I can interpret each prompt (and maybe I will even tweak the prompts along the way) in whatever manner I choose. Maybe I will pick a YA novel or a book of poetry for the prompt, or maybe I will stick with a novel. And maybe I will interpret the prompt in a way that is totally unexpected, we'll see.
When I jotted down "A Fresh Start" I was thinking that maybe I would find a story of a woman ending a marriage and beginning her new life--a fresh start. In the end however, the fresh start is more of a beginning as the heroine in my novel is just starting out in life. She is on the cusp of adulthood, only sixteen at the beginning of the story, but already she is ready to change her life. The Beautiful Visit is Elizabeth Jane Howard's first novel published in 1950. I love EJH, but I have read far too little of her work, and she has written close to twenty books. Best known for her Cazalet Chronicles and maybe, too, for her marriage to Kingsley Amis, she led a most interesting life which I read about in her excellent memoir, Slipstream. I read the first three of the five books that make up the Cazalet Chronicles and had started a reread, but as I scoped my piles looking for a suitable book, this one jumped out at me, and it is turning out to be a perfect choice.
The story is narrated in the first person and opens with a dreamy sequence in the prologue. I'm not sure how old she is or what the circumstances are and maybe she is literally dreaming, but she finds herself wrapped in a fur sleeping and when she wakes she has this ridiculous thought that she had just been born! "My life loomed before me, as wide with chance as it had been the day I was born." And then we jump into the story, which is the story of her life it seems. "I was born in Kensington. My Father was a composer. My mother came from a rich home . . ."
When she is sixteen her sister is invited to stay in the country home of a family which is friends with her mother. But the sister doesn't want to go, and the family says "send another daughter" and so a little reluctantly our narrator goes. I do believe this is the 'beautiful visit' of the book's title and I suspect it is going to change her life. I have to share this marvelous passage where she enters the house and is floored by what she sees and what will linger so long in her memory.
"We walked back through the arch, pushed open the green front door, and were in the large hall. I shall never forget the smell of that house. Logs, lavender and damp, the old scent of a house that has been full of flowers for so many years that the very pollen and flower pots stay behind intangibly enchanting--candles and grapes--weak aged taffeta stretched on the chairs--drops of sherry left in fragile shallow glasses--nectarines and strawberries--the warm earthy confidential odor of enormous books and butterfly smell of the pages, a combination of leather and moth--dense mahogany ripe with polishing and the sun--guns and old coats--smooth dead fur on the glaring sentimental deers' heads--beeswax, brown sugar and smoke--it smelled of everything I first remember seeing there, and I shall never forget it."
Set before WWI when a young woman had little to expect from life, this visit is going to change her life, I think. I am planning on finishing this before the end of the month and before I choose another book for my next prompt. This is a promising start and I shall enjoy spending time inside the pages of this book!