Today is Hide a Book Day, when readers have the chance to celebrate the 10th birthday of the Goodreads website by joining in with book fairies worldwide in a giveaway of books – I don’t know about you but I can’t resist the chance to be a book fairy for the day!
So irresistible is this opportunity that I took part both yesterday and today. Yesterday I hid a Mary Stewart book for Mary Stewart Day (the writer would have been 101 years old on 17 September) and I wrote about it on my Mary Queen of Plots blog: you can read the article here.
Today I have had some fun after work by hiding five more books. I chose to hide them in Dunfermline’s Pittencrieff Park, usually called simply ‘the Glen’.
I hid Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie first. I really really like his Flavia de Luce series and I’d give this one 5 stars. Flavia is a wonderful amateur detective, a precocious, lonely, chemistry-obsessed 11-year-old girl who solves murders. The novels are crime books for adults that are funny, clever, moving and they depict life in 1950s England for the impoverished upper classes with effortless perfection. I hope the book’s finder will enjoy reading Flavia’s adventures as much as I do.
Here is the book in situ: it is propped up in the empty statue niche. You will note the Ziploc bag – there was no rain while I hid the books but in Scotland we know that rain is never very far away…
Next I hid Christobel Kent’s Crooked House. I gave this thriller 4 stars on Goodreads, you can read my short review of it here. I hid the book at one of the outside tables of the Peacock Rooms – I was there at the weekend too and I recommend it: scrummy scones and if your goddaughter decides to tell the women who work there *all* about the toy she has just bought, they are very good listeners!
Next up was Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead. I am quite sure this is a good read but it has languished in one of my book-cases unread for too long so it is part of the giveaway. This one went onto a bench inside the glass-house in the Glen.
Also hidden today was Jeffrey Deaver’s Solitude Creek. Again this is one I have not read, I have tried one of his novels before but I didn’t think it was very well-written, let’s hope this one ends up in a more appreciative home! At this point in the giveaway I felt a tiny bit menaced – a squirrel seemed to think a Ziploc bag must contain squirrel-food and it shadowed me very closely as I placed and photographed the book…
Finally, I made my way to the Glen’s ‘rustic shelter’ and there I hid Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold. I don’t know if Mary Stewart ever visited Dunfermline but she lived in Scotland (Edinburgh and Argyllshire) from 1956 until her death in 2014. Mary Stewart was in her early 70s when this novel was published and it is not as heart-stutteringly suspenseful as her earlier thrillers but it is beautifully written and a very good read. I give it 5 stars.
Can you spot the photobombing squirrel?
I hope that you have enjoyed this little book-tour of Dunfermline’s 76 acre park gifted to the town by Andrew Carnegie in 1903. Have you taken part in #Hideabookday or found one of the books given away all over the world today?
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