A Company of Swans - Eva Ibbotson

This is hands down one of my favorite books. I read it quite a while ago, and until recently could only remember that it had something to do with the River Sea, a wealthy man in the Amazon, and an English girl who somehow found herself in his company long enough to fall in love before she was whisked back to her dreary English home and half starved for being so bold as to have ruined herself. She vows to remember her time in the Amazon, but one day cannot remember the precise pattern of her lover's carpet, and her spirit finally breaks. Of course, at the last minute he finds her and they marry and everyone lives happily ever after.

Actually that's a pretty good summary, but wasn't good enough for me to find the book with any search engines. By some stroke of sheer luck, however, I found a copy in a used bookstore in Hyderabad and the back looked interesting enough to convince me to buy it. It was only halfway through the book that I realized it was the one I had been looking for for so long! It's things that this that made me start this blog.

Ibbotson shows her great love for music and tiny heroines here. Harriet Morton is a ballerina and she sneaks away to the Amazon to perform with a company there, which is where she meets Rom. Rom turns out to be the denounced half brother of a man whose young son Harriet is quite fond of. Her father and aunt do not approve of her behavior in the Amazon and drag her back home, but not before Rom has the chance to confuse Harriet's affections for the young son with his hated brother, who it turns out has blown his brains out due to enormous debts. His widow, Rom's first love (so complicated!), when she hears of Rom's enormous wealth, sets out to find him, and so Harriet does not struggle against the fact that she must lose him and when her family essentially kidnaps her she hardly struggles.

In the end, Rom and Harriet marry and her family is appeased because he turns out to be of notable lineage, and the widow is put in her place but not unkindly. It's such a satisfying a lovely story.

Rom and Harriet's relationship is given ample development, as are the characters of her father, aunt, and initial fiance. The imagery of the Amazon show's Ibbotson's love of nature as well - it almost makes me want to go there - almost - and then I remember all the insects in Peru. Harriet Morton is made of stronger stuff than I.

Cranberry Queen - Kathleen DeMarco

Read this while I was in Kerala at an extremely boring Ayurvedic treatment center. The premise is that the protagonist's  mother, father, and brother die in a car accident leaving her with no immediate family. She quits her job, stops bathing, etc etc - all normal responses, if you ask me. Then one day her aunt, uncle and best friend stage an intervention, trying to force her to go a therapist for depression. Instead, she chooses to flee into the Connecticut countryside, and meet a bunch of people who randomly take her in for a few days.

The majority of the book focuses on these few days in the countryside. She meets and falls for a man who ends up being her host's long lost lover of sorts, but he ends up being engaged to someone else so they both lose out anyway. A short, unattractive man hits on her relentlessly despite her rebuffs. And her host's grandmother is diagnosed with a terminal disease.

Ultimately, she reveals the death of her family to her host, and she goes back to her home in New York to face the people she ran away from. I believe she pulls herself together and soon after that the terminally ill grandmother passes away. And the long lost lover breaks off his engagement and sends her a vague postcard.

The whole thing is written in a very odd way and I did not enjoy it. I can't even remember any of the characters' names and I read it two months ago. It's not a bad book, but the plot was very strange and the style was even stranger.