Right? Put me off Cornwell, although I read her Jack the Ripper stuff.

She was a good writer; it was just the genre. The book was The Body Farm. Yikes!

Mine’s not all that terrible, but I started dating a very nice (and somewhat wealthy) man a few weeks before Christmas. Since we were brand new, I’m sure I got him some thoughtful but inexpensive thing, and he gave me a book. A brand new, hardcover mystery book by Patricia Cornwell that he obviously had laying around and just grabbed. A book would have been a great gift but I don’t read mysteries (but felt obligated to read this one) and once we’d have been dating a little longer he would have been able to accurately gauge my reading tastes.

We went out for years and he ended up being a stellar gift giver!

This was a pivotal book for me in my childhood too, and I remember trying hard to be a witch! I checked it out of my grade school library several times in the 1960’s.

A couple of years ago I was at a Salvation Army and I saw a copy of “Jennifer…” I don’t really like old library books but I picked it up out of idle curiosity. IT WAS THE SAME BOOK FROM MY GRADE SCHOOL LIBRARY with my name sloppily written three times on the little card tucked inside.

You know I bought it and treasure it still!

I read many of Alcott’s books as a child, and re-read many as an adult when I began working in the children’s department in a library. Wow, the books are SO moralizing and sometimes rather heavy - I can’t believe that I loved them as a 10 year old in the 60’s!

Recently I scored a pretty copy of Eight Cousins so I re-read that, and afterwards A Rose In Bloom on Project Gutenberg and again, I love the stories and agree with a lot of her sermons on women not wearing corsets, and boys not smoking, but there’s such a heavy moral tone to everything.

Everybody loves Little Women (including many who have only seen the movies) but my god, suffer through Jack and Jill. Or others.

So it’s wild that she wrote all the crazy melodramas! I’m hoping this new stuff is bodice rippers or another genre.