We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. But that family is far from a unified front. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case. But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year.
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