Jan 8, 2025
Eva Ibbotson, A Countess Below Stairs
seen from United States
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seen from Argentina
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seen from Malaysia
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seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Türkiye
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seen from United States
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Eva Ibbotson, A Countess Below Stairs
An under discussed genus is the 20th century British author who wrote a lot of One Thing In Particular, that may or may not be interrelated or form a series, and did their readers the added kindness of none of the books requiring ordered reading.
This is genius as once you find one you enjoy it's like having a pantry of pickles and preserves you can go back and dip into whenever you're craving that particular thing. Bonus there's often no 'right' way to approach any of them, you can walk in and out as you like zero pressure or time constraints. They're evergreen.
In honor of JKR being a total waste of breath and space yet again:
Other (better) books to read instead of Harry Potter—
1. The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson.
“ Under Platform 13 in one of London’s busiest train stations is an old doorway covered with peeling posters. Behind I is the entrance to a magical kingdom and island where humans live happily with mermaids, ogres and mysterious creatures called mist makers. When a beastly woman named Mrs. Trottle kidnaps the islands young Prince, it’s up to a strange band of rescuers to find him, save him, and return him to the king and queen. But can the rescuers—an ogre, a hag, a wizard and a fey troop around London unnoticed? And what if the prince doesn’t want to go back?”
(This book contains an impoverished ‘orphan’ raised by cruel adults, a bumbling old wizard, magical young adults, and an entrance to a magical world on a train platform in London. Sound familiar? Because it was released in 1994…three years prior to the first Harry Potter book. Just sayin’.)
More below the cut:
read in 2025. the secret countess by eva ibbotson ★★★★☆
do you know what is best of all? when one has been hurt or saddened, then suddenly to turn everything upside down and be very happy.
my first ever sighting of Eva Ibbotson's non-kids' books in the wild and it's these three for $3 each at the thrift store!
newest book 🪻 | 19 May 2026
The flutes are magic and the castles are crumbling in post-war Europe, and Bella's book club is reading Eva Ibbotson's Magic Flutes, from Chapter 7 this Aussie Saturday morning/Yankee Friday night.
Join the discord | How does read along work?
Lindsey’s Books of the Month (February 2026)
It was a good month if I do say so myself, you guys.
No stars, only thoughts and vibes. Also I try to avoid spoilers but proceed with caution if you haven’t read these.
The Boxcar Children (#3): The Yellow House Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner
The Alden children are back! I’ve been reading these at bedtime to my girls, and this one is a reread of a childhood favorite.
Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden are starting the summer off right; the cave full of indigenous artifacts they discovered on Surprise Island last year is ready to be excavated, and their first-cousin-once-removed Joe is marrying a VERY nice girl named Alice. They all learn the secret of the Yellow House on Surprise Island, and resolve to find Bill, the long-lost husband of kindly housekeeper Mrs. McGregor.
You cannot imagine the way Small Lindsey wanted to go on a canoe trip up a river and solve a mystery. Alas, alack, I was more blessed with mountains than rivers, and the adults closest to me were not Deep Woods Campers.
Slight warning: this book was written in the 1920s, and there are some depictions of native Americans that are almost certainly out of date (I’m not sure where Rita falls in this conversation but I ought to say something). Even so, the vibes and atmosphere of this book are wonderful. Highly recommend if you have kids to read to or you just need to rekindle your childlike wonder at what all you can find out in nature.
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Twelve Clues of Christmas (Her Royal Spyness #6) by Rhys Bowen
This took me forever on Libby between the holidays and a wretched stomach bug, and that’s no fault of the book or its enjoyability. But I finished it!
With her brother and sister-in-law making it look like it’ll be a blue Christmas at Castle Rannoch, Georgie answers an advertisement for assistance as a gentlewoman/party planner/legitimizer of the Old-fashioned English Christmas her hostess is trying to sell to paying guests. Her hostess is also a gentlewoman dealing with financial strain (the Great Depression, amirite?) and Darcy O’Mara’s aunt. With Georgie’s mother and beloved grandfather staying nearby with Noel Coward, it looks like Georgie is in for a Happy Christmas after all.
But when villagers and guests start dying from unusual accidents, it’s up to Georgie and Darcy to figure out just what is interrupting their peaceful Christmas.
YOU GUYS. I was expecting a fluffy Christmas Special type entry in the series and nothing more. While it is a Christmas special, fluffy it is not. There are moments of shock and horror, as well as moments that had me kicking my feet and squealing like a schoolgirl. An excellent mystery at any time of the year.
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The League of Lady Poisoners: Illustrated True Stories of Dangerous Women by Lisa Perrin
I picked this up on Libby on a whim. As someone who loves feminism and history and seeks to write good murder mysteries, it seemed a logical choice. And, while I knew many of the women in this book already (shoutout to that time I geeked out about the Affair of the Poisons to Sarah @blodgmonster ), the ones I knew about had more details and there were quite a few I hadn’t even heard of!
It was almost over too fast and I wouldn’t mind owning a physical copy for my own reference library. If you liked The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum or any of the umpteen books listing rebellious or interesting women throughout history, go ahead and give it a try!
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Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson
This was a Christmas gift to my girls (specifically the second one, from my friend Rachel) which I have been reading by chapters at bedtime. Where WAS this book all my life before now??
Arriman the Awful, grand evil wizard of the north, has been waiting for years for his prophesied replacement to arrive so he can retire — to no avail. So he’s holding a contest for the local witches to see who will be his wife, so he can father a child to take over the family business.
Among the witches of nearby Todcaster is Belladonna, a white witch who is kind and compassionate and who desperately wants to (1) do black magic and (2) marry Arriman, not because he’s the Great Evil Wizard of the North but because she’s genuinely smitten with him.
It’s going to take all of Belladonna’s good will from Arriman’s staff, an orphan boy, his pet worm, the local theater community, and a touch of real magic to get Belladonna her heart’s desire.
This was my second Eva Ibbotson book I’ve ever read (shoutout to Mal for lending me A Countess Below Stairs when I got my wisdom teeth out in 2008), and I absolutely loved it. Her voice and sense of humor are both delightful. And delightfully British. She reminds me a little of Terry Pratchett. That’s a good thing. And may I add it is an excellent antidote to misery amidst, well, *gestures broadly at the state of things. *
I highly recommend this book to you as an antidote to despair. You’ll sorrow, you’ll chuckle, you’ll thrill.
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Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
This was pressed into my hands by my friend Rachel, so I was pretty excited to read it! I’ve been meaning to dip my toes into Horowitz’s work for years but never got around to it. Beyond, of course, his excellent work dramatizing Agatha Christie’s work for the David Suchet versions of Poirot.
UNTIL NOW!
Susan Ryeland is editor for Alan Conway’s runaway hit Atticus Pünd series of whodunnit novels. As she edits the final book in the series for publication, she finds the final chapter (and the solution to the mystery) missing from the typescript. That evening, the author is found dead. As Susan looks around his home in a remote English village, she starts to see the building blocks of his famous books—including the possible clues to his own murder.
There is something special about reading something written by someone who you can tell is as big a fan as you are, and this book could not be more By A Mystery Lover, For Mystery Lovers. Plus the cast of characters are so vivid, different, and deeply real.
If you love mysteries set in England at any age, pick up this book.
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Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie
(Not the cover I have, but isn’t it gorgeous?)
This was my Read Christie pick for February; you’re supposed to pick something with a favorite character and since I love Ariadne, it’s perfect—this was her first appearance!
Internationally famous detective Hercule Poirot, secret agent man Colonel Race, Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, and bestselling mystery writer Ariadne Oliver go to the same party. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but no one is laughing when their host (who’s kind of a pretentious jerkwad) ends up stabbed.
We’ve all known Mr. Shaitanas in our life; someone who styles themself as “deliberately Mephistophelean” and tries so hard to be the most interesting and charming edgelord in the room. We’ve all looked at that person and thought that one day he’d edgelord too close to the sun. Nice to know that, at least as far back as 1936, that explerience is universal. Though of course usually that morally relativistic philosophy major whose best friend was dating your best friend (just me?) doesn’t get stabbed at his own game night. Usually.
Agatha took the trouble of writing a foreword in this one, a foreword which assures the reader that there will be no trope-y tricks, no “*gasp! * the last person we suspected!” She asserts, 90 years ago, that we can solve this purely on psychology.
I still was mostly able to follow and guess at the psychology of the suspects the whole time, in spite of the fact that their psychology is revealed through how they play the game of Bridge. I don’t know how to play bridge. Or poker. Or baccarat. As a mystery/espionage media lover you would think I would know by now. I absolutely do not. But Agatha makes it easy for non-bridge-players to see how these people play the game and what that reveals about them.
Ariadne is Agatha’s self-insert character and she pokes quite a bit of fun at herself while still making some really good observations.
A thing that’s fun about this is it’s part of the same volume as my copy of Lord Edgeware Dies (Thirteen at Dinner) and The ABC Murders (Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are here too). It came from the library of a dear friend’s late great-uncle; she picked up something for herself and something for me upon his death. Kenneth A. McKenzie, wherever you are sir, I never knew you but your taste was fab.
If you want a puzzle with characters who you feel like you know, this Christie is excellent (as are many of hers.
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The Ink Black Heart (Cormoran Strike & Robin Ellacott #6) by Robert Galbraith
From old universal experiences to new ones, Strike and Ellacott are back to answer the question: was Twitter worth it? (I kid, I kid. Kind of.)
Robin Ellacott is freshly divorced and enjoying life at the busy detective agency she runs with best friend and business partner Cormoran Strike. She has to turn away Web Cartoonist turned Netflix Cartoon creator Edie Ledwell when Ledwell comes to the agency for help identifying the troll, Anomie, who has made her life hell. Robin is intrigued but the agency is already stretched to capacity and with a waiting list for clients.
But when Edie is murdered and her creative partner paralyzed in the historic cemetery where the cartoon takes place, Edie’s relatives and the production company hire the agency to track down Anomie. With the roster of clients recently clearer and Robin wracked with guilt, the agency accepts and goes down the rabbit hole of Internet fandoms, incel pickup culture, a far-right terrorist group, Art collectives, and Robin and Strike’s inability to just. Be. Honest with their feelings.
To be totally fair to the author, the characters are such that their lives/experiences/circumstances make the delay realistic. That’s done very skillfully. I am simply complaining because I am a spoiled Tommy and Tuppence fan.
The mystery itself is a dense, twisty dark chocolate cake of a puzzle. I almost don’t dare say more (ten years married to an extremely analytical person has me uber-paranoid of giving away spoilers), so I will simply say I regularly gasped aloud while listening at work.
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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
When I tell you I have meant to read this book for over a decade…
This book tells the story of both the construction of the Chicago World’s Fair (you may have heard of it? Birthplace of both brownies and waffle cones?) AND the sinister crimes of H.H. Holmes. If you haven’t heard of this man, you are in for the shudders. I actually started this book in 2025 and had to put it down. He built a hotel to murder people in multiple ways, and had a most disturbing (for me) habit of turning his victims into articulated skeletons for local medical colleges.
There was a LOT of drama and while the ladies in charge of the women’s building had their fair share of disagreements, it definitely the men who have the drama and ego here (gosh I wish we were past that as a society but I guess not). Think the world’s largest group project with the highest stakes. And some of the most monumental egos of the 19th century.
Larson beautifully juxtaposes the amount spent by these wealthy men both on the fair and in their personal lives, and how much the men doing the labor (and most of the rest of the country) were struggling to survive. Rather poignant read lately.
Originally this was my True Crime Sauna Time read, but the glossy cover wasn’t taking the heat well so I moved it into regular rotation.
And now I’m ready for the adaptation I’ve heard Scorsese is planning! Granted, he’s been planning on it since 2016 BUT apparently DiCaprio is attached now! So….progress?
That being said it is HEAVY and I desperately needed a chaser afterwards. Luckily, I guessed I would need one in advance (H.H. Holmes is an ultimate Dead Dove Do Not Eat if you know even a little historical true crime) and had one ready to go.
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Road Trip with a Vampire (My Vampires, #3) by Jenna Levine
Nice fluffy paranormal romance. Just the chaser I needed, and I devoured it.
Griselda “Zelda” Watson has left practicing magic — and her dangerous antics as Griselda the Terrible — behind and now works as a yoga teacher in Northern California. Everything is fairly peaceful until Peter shows up on her doorstep—hot, fanged, and with no memories since he woke up spread eagle in front of a safe two months ago. Zelda’s old friend Reggie sent Peter her way (because if there’s a thing we’ve learned about Reggie in this series, he will fly by the seat of his pants). When Zelda’s magic starts acting up and Peter starts getting threatening notes from a JR (who is he? Peter has no idea), they go on a cross-country road trip to get Peter’s memories back and figure out the right amount of expenditure to keep Zelda’s magic in between repressed and the chaotic inferno she used to be when she used it Willy-nilly.
Peter and Zelda are people who have made mistakes but they SEE each other and help each other heal, love each other mistakes and all. The banter and chemistry and spice are all fantastic.
This is one of my favorite, I think most underrated romance series out now. This is also the last book in the series (devastated). But Jenna Levine is planning a novel about a grim reaper falling in love with a girl whose soul he collected, so fingers crossed that fills the My-Vampires-sized hole in my reader heart.
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Animorphs: The Unknown (Animorphs #14) by K.A. Applegate
I did not, in fact, actually have to wait six whole weeks. That’s the wonderful thing about Libby; we all over-place holds and we all help each other out when they all come due at once. Sharing is caring in a reader-to-reader symbiotic library dragon relationship. But anyway:
Cassie, her dad the veterinarian, and her best friend Rachel all go out on a call to help a sick Roan horse (which my Horse Girl Friend Sarah @blodgmonster tells me is not really any one specific color per se). Things go from Wild At Heart to Disney Channel’s So Weird when the horse tries to use a roadside phone booth—and then into all-too-familiar territory when a Yeerk crawls out of the horse’s ear. Why would a Yeerk make a horse a controller? What would the Yeerks (aliens themselves) want at ~Totally Not Area 51~ Zone 91? It’s up to the Animorphs to figure it out!
Featuring:
- Totally Not Area 51
- Yo Dawg I heard you like sci-fi so we put some extra sci-fi in your sci-fi
- Military stereotypes. But well-used.
- been spending most our lives living in a horse girl’s paradise
- Evading the military at an amusement park
- What feels like a very Douglas Adams type joke about the nature of what’s hidden at Totally Not Area 51
- Kentucky Derby odds
- Ax waxing patronizing about how primitive human technology when human technology literally brought him his two favorite things: salt and grease.
This one also did the cool narrative device, for a few chapters at least, of telling you the mistake they made in advance without context. Really spiked up the anxiety. A++, I sped through it in a day of sending out event packages at work.
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Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn
(What do you MEAN there’s a ten-photo limit on mobile posts??? That’s so STUPID!!)
You cannot imagine the THRILL that gripped me when I saw this sequel to Killers in of a Certain Age in Poppy Books. I had no idea she was planning a sequel when I finished it but HUZZAH!
After their Time of Lying Low, the ladies of Sphinx Squad (Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie) get called back into service by new museum head (and recent new mom x2) Naomi. Far from the hoped-for news that it’s pension time, the ladies learn that there’s a mole in the museum. Naomi doesn’t know who, only what they accessed, and it includes details of an assassination the Sphinxes carried out. It’s up to the Sphinxes to kill before they’re killed in a fiendish and tense chase across Europe, with old faces and new enemies along the way.
These books are such a treat. Raybourn’s humor is My Exact Thing, and we love a story of ladies who kill the real monsters (especially in this day and age).
I loved it, I devoured it. If you want something that feels good in a time of powerful sleazeballs run amok, if you’re tired of being nice and you want to go a little apeshit, if you love stories where the characters travel, if you love action/thrills/chills, or all of the above, these books are for you.
I genuinely hope she finds an excuse to write a third one. Deanna Raybourn if you are reading this……
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Heirs and Graces (Her Royal Spyness #7) by Rhys Bowen
It arrived early!
Georgie is left high and dry by her mother, but just in time she’s called to help a friend of her cousin, Queen Mary. Edwina, the Dowager Duchess of Eynsford, needs Georgie to help mold her Australian grandson Jack into the ideal future Duke. So off she goes to a country house in Kent, with accommodation and gorgeous food. Current Duke of Eynsford, Cedric, is almost too gay to function and a certified public a-hole who seems dedicated to pissing off everyone around him. When the Duke ends up dead with Jack’s knife in his back, it’s up to Georgie to prove that the wild colonial boy didn’t do it.
This one was different and a little familiar all at once with the classic English country house setting and clever setup. The pacing near the end felt a little off to me but that may have just been because of the nature of the plot. There are some settings I would like to have seen explored more, but the characters are absolutely delightful.
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Golden Son (Red Rising #2) by Pierce Brown
YOU GUYS. I thought this would be a March finish for sure. Yet lo, here we are. God Bless the overeager Libby users.
Darrow is in for more life-or-death every day of his FREAKING life and now he seems to have lost the love of his patron.
I cannot say more other than that I am TOTALLY FREAKING OUT. I may break aund buy the whole series at this point rather than wait for the library.
Looking ahead: March 2026
I’ll be rereading my beloved Sleeping Murder for Agatha Christie, plus more Cormoran Strike and a smattering of fantasy.
And possibly doing this from my laptop next time.
Reveal Your Soul in 4 Books
@dags-over-caravans tagged me for this, and hoo boy was it a doozy trying to narrow down my book choices.
The instructions are simple: show me who you are via the books that have stayed with you. The top four, all time. Tell me why you chose them. That’s it, that’s all. Pick the four most meaningful books to you, according to whatever measure(s) you value, and reveal your innermost depths.
I'm not exactly sure these are my "top four of all time," but they're definitely up there. Books that either meant something to me at the time that I read them, or prompted something, or are otherwise a book I will go back to for a re-read at times (more often than the others on my shelves).
And I'm going to tag @shadrachanki (good luck narrowing your collection down), @himluv, @brynriith, @jadeandroses, and @mama-qwerty, if you guys want to play along. Or just make faces at my narrow genre selection because I know what I like and this is what I read for fun (unlike what I read for my English degree). ;)
Warning: if you're upset by damage to books, view with caution. These are photos of my actual copies on my shelves, and some of them are...rather old and well-loved. I regret nothing.
