Stella Gibbons – Cannonball Read 17

Holiday Reads: Alpine Edition

The Clinic by Cate Quinn

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

The Dry by Jane Harper

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

A Sincere Warning About the Entity in your House by Jason Arnopp

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

July 31, 2024 by Zirza Leave a Comment

Apparently, all I need in life is a pile of books, a fridge full of cheese and diet coke and a massive tent. The Clinic (Cate Quinn) ** Certified tough chick (™) Meg checks into an exclusive rehab clinic, not to treat her own burgeoning drug problem, but to discover what happened to her sister Haley, a famous actress who died on the grounds. The clinic claims suicide, but Meg doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate what really happened. I read this book […]

So, what happened to the goat?

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

May 12, 2020 by blauracke Leave a Comment

When young socialite Flora Poste is orphaned, she decides to move to her cousin Judith Starkadder’s farm in Sussex where her Aunt Ada Doom, who saw “something nasty in the woodshed” as a girl and has not been right in the head ever since, rules over the family with an iron hand, and everyone seems to live in abject misery. She immediately decides to help her relatives escape their squalid and dreary existence by “tidying up” the place and its inhabitants. A parody of the […]

What if PG Wodehouse had written Wuthering Heights?

August 25, 2015 by ElCicco 2 Comments

Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons is a marvelous send up of brooding romantic literature in the vein of the Bronte sisters. In addition to a crazy woman upstairs, a dark and hunky cad, crazy gibberish talking locals, and a plucky dauntless heroine, Gibbons gives her reader some hilarious dialogue and overall goofiness that is difficult to resist. Gibbons represents the best of British humor a la Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome and of women writers of the 1930s such as Dawn Powell and […]

“From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, / London, one moment fallen and forgot.”

November 8, 2014 by drmllz 2 Comments

I loved Westwood, and it’s increasingly rare that I love books at first read. I generally rather enjoy Stella Gibbons’s work (and I reviewed The Matchmaker here) but apart from Cold Comfort Farm, which I adore unequivocally, I’ve found Gibbons’s novels to be pleasant rather than stimulating. Westwood (1946) manages to be both comforting and sparkling, a Victorian novel of morality and marriage with a Regency comedy of manners at its heart, and sprinkled with the fragments of a modernist tale of disconnection, dysfunctional marriage, […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

Help Our Mission