I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is an absolutely lovely coming-of-age story about first love and family obligation. It's set sometime in the 1930s in Rural England. The patriarch of the family wrote a critically acclaimed novel some ten years before the book opens, and took a 40 year lease on a castle that he thought would inspire his next great work. But that never happened, and the family has slid into abject poverty. The book is narrated by middle child Cassandra, who has procured a notebook and decided to keep a journal as practice for the novel she wants to write. Lucky for her, exciting things start to happen almost immediately, giving her a lot of new experiences to write about and new emotions to suss out between the pages of her journals. The family's landlord - who they haven't paid rent to in years - dies, and his grandsons come from America to take stock of their inheritance. Cassandra's older sister, Rose, becomes determined to marry one of them...