Readthrough schedule: The Thuggery Affair

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to discussion about Peter's Room and especially to legionseagle for providing a fantastic set of discussion posts. If anyone would like to do some guest posts in the future please drop me a line. I know coughingbear has expressed an interest in posting on The Cricket Term; if anyone else is interested in any of the upcoming novels, do send me a pm or comment on this post.

Onward to The Thuggery Affair!

24th October

Chapter 1: 'There's a hole in your Boatie'
Chapter 2: 'Two Pigeons Flying High'
Chapter 3: A Gentleman of the Fancy
Chapter 4: '...Poor Airy Post"

31st October

Chapter 5: A Brush with the Enemy
Chapter 6: Communications Cut
Chapter 7: The Costume for the Part

7th November

Chapter 8: Old Man Kangaroo
Chapter 9: Character Part
Chapter 10: Telling the Tale
Chapter 11: The Dovecote at Monks Culvery

14th November

Chapter 12: 'Who Did Not Wish to Die'
Chapter 13: The Flyaway
Chapter 14: The Homing Instinct

coughingbear can also help with texts for readers who don't have all the books: just send her a pm.

Review of Player's Boy from 1971

[coughingbear]

Looking for something else, I came across this brief review by Gillian Avery of Player's Boy in The Tablet from 1971, so thought I would put it here in case other people don't know it:

Sweeping forward some three thousand years to 1590 Antonia Forest in The Player's Boy plunges into the uncertainties of England in the reign of Elizabeth the First. Her eleven year-old hero moves into a world of intrigue and secret plotting via the death of Kit Marlowe, an encounter with Lord Southampton and a place with Will Shakespeare's company of players. He works his way through the girl's parts and we leave him as a promising Hotspur. The background to the story is skilfully laid in. Antonia Forest catches the atmosphere of the players in a society totally dependant upon the patronage of the powerful and succeeds in conveying a wholly satisfactory impression of day to day living in a world of conflicting loyalties and uncertain futures which both lives vividly in the mind of the reader and satisfies the most demanding historian.There is a moving chapter in which we see through the eyes of our young actor hero a Tyburn execution of three Papists, one of whom he recognises.

I had a quick search in the archives to see if there were other reviews of her books, but only found one, from December 1953, by Pamela Whitlock:

Miss Antonia Forest's The Marlows and the Traitor (Faber, 10s. 6d.) is one of those novels for young people of which the standard seems to get higher every year. She has taken one of the most baffling problems of today, the psychology of treachery, and deals with it in terms of the experience of children none of whom are out of their teens, and though there are, of course, grown-ups in the story, and the traitor himself is one, yet the whole story turns on the attitude of the children to their discovery that the naval officer whom their brother thinks wonderful is, in fact, on the wrong side : the algebraical equation of The Heat of the Day, in other terms. The dialogue is vivid and assured, the plot integrated and the characterization is neatly defined, and we really care about the nice Marlows and their friends ; one even cares about the traitor, which of course would happen in real life.