Corpus bones*, I loved this book.
My friend Laura recommended it to me years ago, and, as usual, I bought it right away but just never got around to reading it.
It is so good, I am thoroughly ashamed of myself.
Written in the form of a diary, this book is set in late-13th century England and details the daily trials and tribulations (and occasional joys) of Birdy, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an uncouth but somewhat powerful minor noble of the time. Whether discussing the parasites that plague her, the maidenly occupations that annoy her, or the forthcoming marriage that disgusts her, she is a feisty, hopeful yet strangely pragmatic soul, who rails against her inevitable fate but is aware that she has little say in the course her life will take.
The book does not shy away from some of the less pleasant aspects of Medieval life, nor does it romanticize the period. it is funny, it is immersive, it is upsetting and thought-provoking. One of my favourite parts of the book is how Birdy often denotes her days often by the feast days of saints (England was solidly Catholic at this time), and gives a rather acerbic commentary on the reason for their sainthood. She’s a free-thinker in a time when such was discouraged, especially in the “gentler sex,” and she makes one wonder exactly how many of the girls and women who have disappeared from history — history — might have been just as charming, intelligent and resilient as Catherine, called Birdy.
It was a pleasure to meet her. And I very much hope she ended up with her happily ever after.
* “Corpus bones” is a favourite exclamation of Birdy’s, which I am assuming Cushman gleaned from Chaucer. I very much appreciate this kind of period-specific detail. I was less enamoured of all the fleas, which I know is era-appropriate, but ew.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 280: Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
GENRE: YA, Historical Fiction
PUBLISHED: 1994
TIME ON THE TBR: 5 years.
PURCHASED FROM: Amazon.
KEEP: Absolutely!
This book has just restored my faith in its entire genre. After having read a bunch of lacklustre YA novels lately, I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever read one that I really loved ever again — or, worse, whether I had at last outgrown them.
It came as something of a surprise to me when I learned that Philip Pullman had released other YA novels long before his best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy took the world by storm. Coming upon this historical mystery YA quite by accident some years back, of course I bought it and of course I didn’t read it.
There was a time in the early part of the this decade — which is soon to end; I can’t believe it either — when it seemed like every second YA novel released was mired in some kind of dystopian hell world. This… is another one of those. And it’s not a bad one.
I have read dozens of Pride and Prejudice reimaginings, revisions and variations, many of which have been YA and yet more of which have moved the story into modern times and more diverse cultural milieus. Of those dozens of versions, quite the best of them all may very well be Pride, in which Zuri Benitez and Darius Darcy hate their way to love on the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn.
I can’t remember the last time I got so far into a book before being forced to stop reading it. I actually got to the 75% mark of this one, and then a plot development so stupid, so utterly without reason or justification or sense, took place so suddenly that I was just like… nope. Not doing it anymore. 
Lily and Cade hate each other. There are various reasons. They do not matter.
I have a particular fondness for Rick Riordan’s YA retelling of various world mythologies, and while I probably wouldn’t have gotten into his ever-expanding alternate universe at all had he started with the Norse gods we visit with in the Magnus Chase series, the fact that he began with Percy Jackson and the Olympians — way back in 2005 — hooked me immediately. Greek myths have been an obsession with me since I was eight years old and my friend Megan swapped me (for several Babysitter’s Club books, as I recall) a chapter book retelling of them called The Dolphin Rider by Bernard Evslin, an author who remains, to this day, one of the biggest influences on my life to date.
Wodehouse’s second novel, and second school book, brings up a very modern family issue in an old world context. A senior schoolboy at a select boarding school is told that his uncle is coming to visit — but that uncle, it transpires, is a cheeky young thing newly enrolled in the school, several years behind his nephew, as the product of a late marriage. 
I love P. G. Wodehouse so, so much. I have never read a Wodehouse novel — and there are dozens upon dozens of those things — and not been enchanted. His use of language, his humour, his sense of place and time; he brings to life a wholly fictional, but wholly delightful, vision of upper class, moneyed life in the early half of the twentieth century, and it is uniformly delightful, and invariably hilarious.