{"id":6500,"date":"2014-10-28T18:22:58","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T22:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6500"},"modified":"2014-10-28T18:22:58","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T22:22:58","slug":"half-a-crown-by-jo-waltontor-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/half-a-crown-by-jo-waltontor-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Half a Crown by Jo WaltonTor, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

Half a Crown<\/em> was compulsively readable, the kind of book that had me staying up past my bedtime, sitting on the edge of the bathtub reading after I’d brushed my teeth, reluctant to put it down. It also had me repeatedly wailing, “This is terrible!” to my boyfriend, who read this a few months ago. Not that the book is terrible—it’s not. Rather, various plot points are terrible\/stressful to read about\/horribly depressing, which is to be expected given the mood and events of the first two books in the trilogy, and given that this one is set in 1960 in a fascist London, in a world in which Hitler is still in power in Germany, the English having made peace with him to end the Second World War. <\/p>\n

The book follows the now-familiar structure of Farthing<\/em> and Ha’penny<\/em>, with chapters of first-person narration by a young woman alternating with chapters of third-person narration about Peter Anthony Carmichael, who we met in Farthing<\/em> when he was an investigator at Scotland Yard, and who has since moved on to other things. The first-person narration in this one is by Elvira, a young debutante who’s about to be presented to the Queen and who finds herself questioning fascism for the first time in her eighteen years. It’s hard to say anything more about the plot without lots of spoilers, and part of the appeal of this book is the suspense and pacing, so here, have a nice descriptive passage:<\/p>\n

Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark. (39)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Half a Crown was compulsively readable, the kind of book that had me staying up past my bedtime, sitting on the edge of the bathtub reading after I’d brushed my teeth, reluctant to put it down. It also had me repeatedly wailing, “This is terrible!” to my boyfriend, who read this a few months ago. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}