Advent Reading Challenge Day One

Your December TBR pile

As you can see my to-be-read pile is under control. I’ve tried to be sensible about the books that I buy, mostly for space reasons. In the last year I’ve had to get rid of about five hundred books and some of the decisions I made were pretty tough so I don’t want to negate the sacrifices I made. Of course, in the interests of complete honesty, I should tell you that I also have TBR lists on both my Kindle and Kobo!

From the physical stack of books I’ve pulled out one to highlight. Dangerous Inheritance by Mabel Esther Allan has a random distinction in that it is the book I needed to complete my collection of Mabel’s books. Before those of you who know her output get over-excited you need to understand that I have only been collecting her teenage novels. And a few other random titles that I read and enjoyed as a child.

Mabel Esther Allan’s output was huge and diverse. And she used a number of pseudonyms as well as her own name. It was as Jean Estoril I first encountered her as the author of the Drina series. At that time I didn’t know that she was Mabel Esther Allan and I went on to read Black Forest Summer and The Vine-Clad Hill unaware that they were not my first MEA books. She also wrote as Priscilla Hagon and Anne Pilgrim, and I still have two books by the latter to collect. But, strictly speaking, my Mabel Esther Allan collection is finally complete.

Dangerous Inheritance, published in 1970 by Heinemann, is set in New York, a city that Mabel loved. It’s one of her teenage thrillers for want of a better description but (and I didn’t need to read the blurb to know this) there’s also an element of romance as there almost always is in MEA’s teenage books. Some of her books are inevitably better than others but what is always excellent is her ability to bring places to life. I have no doubt that as I read Dangerous Inheritance I will feel that I know New York, although I have, in fact, never set foot in the United States.