Springtime with Topping & Co.

Ruby Recommends I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,” so begins Cassandra, our positively charming, seventeen-year-old narrator, as she looks out on a drizzly March morning from the haven of her crumbling castle home. It is here that she lives with her eccentric family — her feisty sister Rose, her dreamy stepmother Topaz, and her writer’s-blocked father Mortmain. We become her confidants as she weaves her coming-of-age story through journal entries, chronicling a year of great change in her life.

An underrated classic, I Capture the Castle feels like stumbling upon a secret Austen novel. As fresh as the day it was written, Cassandra’s entries are filled with budding love and blossoming maturity, all bobbing down a babbling brook of whimsical asides. Warm and sunny but not without the odd April shower, this little gem makes for a perfect spring read.

Murray Recommends The Grace of Kings – Ken Liu

Spring is the season of hope, possibility, and renewal. It is the season of change — in fact, many political movements which seek to challenge authority are styled as springs. In The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu merges both definitions. In the archipelago of Dara, the people are unhappy. An unlikely allyship forms between a poor but wily Kuni Garu, and the warrior-nobleman Mata Zyndu. Together they decide it’s become time for a change of season.

In this ‘silk-punk’ epic, the first in the Dandelion Dynasty, Liu expertly weaves an extended floral metaphor throughout his otherwise intensely political book. Themes of power, rebellion, and the friendships born in-between are woven together like garlands. This character-driven series is perfect for fans of historical fiction or fantasy this spring — or for those of you who seek the hopeful nature of change that defines both springtime and humanity itself.

Arnaz recommends Angels and Insects — AS Byatt

Angels and Insects is comprised of two novellas set in the second half of the nineteenth

century.  The first novella, ‘Morpho Eugenia’, depicts an insectologist returned from being shipwrecked in the Amazon, who marries into a wealthy English family, naming one of his newly discovered butterflies after his wife. Byatt’s writing deals with both the beauty and sublimity of nature in all its forms, but particularly in insects; Byatt, through her characters, describes both the iridescence of butterflies as well as the natures of ants, using these insects to illuminate Victorian reactions to the rise of scientific thought and evolution in the nineteenth century.