2 Books Like The Ginger Griffin

I enjoy all Trollope's Barchester novels, but this one is a particular longstanding favourite. It is always a pleasure to visit Barsetshire, so thoroughly imagined and described by Trollope (and later by Thirkell); the characters are convincing, often exasperating, always sympathetic; the story is engaging, and the outcome satisfactory; and the whole is interlaced with gentle humour. Trollope insists that the value of a book should be in the narrative and the working out of the story, not just in the final resolution. 'Take the last pages if you please -- learn from them all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose' (chapter 15). The joy of the story, then, should be in the reading of it, not in the resolution of the mystery. There is no rushing a Trollope novel,… show more.

This is an hilarious pastiche of a young woman's diary, supposedly written during the summer of Queen Victoria's coronation. Our heroine and her best friend go up to London to enjoy the social life and see the entertainments surrounding the royal event. In the process they meet several eligible young men, come perilously close to having their reputations severely tarnished, and discover that our heroine's father (who has accompanied them) is even more of a liability than they had thought. The style (in my opinion) perfectly mimics the writing style of the period; the historical detail is excellent -- although the modern reader may have to look up a few points on google -- and the outcome of the story is absolutely what it should be in a light-hearted tale of this kind. Excellent reading for lovers of early nineteenth-century novels.