Does Anyone Out There Remember Catherine Cookson?

Black night wrapped around our group of twenty camper girls huddled in camp chairs around the flaming campfire. Conversation, laced with laughter, ranged from memories of camping escapades to how to call owls to songs long forgotten and brought up on cell phones.

I came home and pulled The Black Velvet Gown from the number of Cookson books on my bookshelf and curled on the couch to read. From the first sentence, I was drawn in. It has been quite sometime since a novel has given me such reader joy and made me oblivious to time. Cookson was a master novelist, a bestselling author of the past century. Her stories were promoted as romances, but she was more accurately a historical novelist. She was the most borrowed author from UK public libraries for seventeen years. She knew her times, places, and people clearly and presented them as real on the page. She made the reader care about them, and without one extra word. I do not skim her pages.

Minutes ago I discovered on Amazon that The Black Velvet Gown was made into a movie in the early 1990s. And also that a hardback reprint of the book is selling for $27, and a paperback for $40! My copy pictured above is the Summit Books of Simon & Schuster edition, published in 1984, the same year it was first published in Great Britain. I’m not selling it! I may want to read it again in another five years.

Wishing you all reader joy–I’m getting back to finishing The Black Velvet Gown.

Grace and peace,

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