Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

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Cbr17bingo School This short novel is considered Muriel Spark’s best work. Set in a girls’ school in Edinburgh in the 1930s, it tells the story of a group of school girls and their influential, charismatic teacher Miss Jean Brodie. “The Brodie Set,” as the girls and their teacher are known, attract envy and suspicion from both students and staff at Marcia Blaine school as Miss Brodie flouts convention and invites her young students into confidences that are deeply inappropriate. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie […]

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

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These are three short and early novels by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark. I am rereading the latter two.   Memento Mori This novel begins with a phone call to an older Dame at a retirement home. The caller tells the woman “You must remember that you will die” and this mysterious and potentially scary call becomes the the central plot to the novel, and opens up to a darkly funny story as the call repeats over and over again. As the call repeats, and […]



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