Novels by Dodie Smith (Study Guide) - I Capture the Castle, the Hundred and One Dalmatians, the Starlight Barking (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: I Capture the Castle, the Hundred and One Dalmatians, the Starlight Barking. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: I Capture the Castle is Dodie Smith's first novel, written in 1949 during a sojourn in America. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for authoring the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in a decaying English castle during the 1930s. The first person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story via her personal journal. The Mortmain family is very poor, but very interesting. Cassandra's father is a writer suffering from writer's block who has not published anything since his first book, Jacob Wrestling (a reference to Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), which was a hit. Ten years before the story begins, he took out a forty-year lease on a dilapidated but beautiful castle, hoping to find either inspiration or isolation there; now, his family is selling off the furniture to buy food. Mortmain's second wife, Topaz, is an exotically beautiful artist's model who enjoys communing with nature, sometimes wearing nothing but hip boots. Rose, the elder daughter, is a classic English beauty pining away in the lonely castle, longing for a chance to meet some eligible (and preferably rich) young men; she tells her sister that she wants to live in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra, the younger daughter and the story's narrator, has literary ambitions and spends a lot of time developing her writing talent by "capturing" everything around her in her journal. Stephen, a handsome, loyal, live-in son of the Mortmain's late cook, and Thomas, the youngest Mortmain chil...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=302302