I was drawn to this little bit of nonsense -- The Not-So-Very-Nice Goings-On at Victoria Lodge -- sitting on the clearance cart at Half Price Books (a moderately interesting mostly illustrated book for $2? of course I'll buy it) because the author (whose name I recognized) is one that my son, Owen, is reading (okay, okay: and that we are reading too, together, as he drifts off to sleep at night).
Gun-toting (never seen) aunts and sisters, plotting servants, and "an over-stuffed robin, packed full of dynamite" (31) make for a pleasant enough diversion. It's not a children's book, at least not in the same way that Ardagh's Eddie Dickens and Awful End books are. The illustrations -- not by the author but copped instead from The Girl's Own Paper (0f 1891-1892) -- are a delight, if you go for that sort of stuff.
And I do.
I suppose I'll leave this out so that one day Owie stumbles across it. He probably won't know what to make of it all. Which is sort of the point. Sort of like the very stuff of our lives: cut and paste and cobbled together to create a mostly absurd story to tell our friends, families, and ourselves.
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