Oh, but I had the best time this week, reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Anybody whose ever been female and fifteen and dreamy can identify with Castle’s heroine, Cassandra Mortmain, who writes everything she sees and hears in her little notebook. I can feel her breathless excitement when I read things like: So much has happened since I last wrote here that I can hardly put it all down, and then she dishes it all up to us.

And who does Cassandra write about?

Her pretty older sister, Rose. Her little brother Thomas. The castle they live in.

Whoa! you say. They live in a castle?

That’s right. Their father is a famous writer. Buying a crumbling old castle is just the sort of impractical thing a writer would do.

Who else does Cassandra scribble about in her notebook?

Her mother is dead, but Father’s new wife, Topaz, wears flowing robes and plays the lute. “I like the idea of a lute, but not the noise it makes,” says Cassandra.

Then there is Stephen, something of a stable boy, who regularly presents Cassandra with poems. She knows he copies them from the great poets and she vows to “be brisk” with poor Stephen.

There is Miss Blossom, a dress form standing in the corner of Cassandra and Rose’s bedroom. Miss Blossom regularly dispenses wisdom to the girls in a voice that probably sounds like Angela Lansbury’s. “Now it is very odd, but I have often told myself things through Miss Blossom that I didn’t know I knew,” writes Cassandra.

There is the Vicar, who looks like “an elderly baby.”

And there is the librarian, Miss Marcy, who blushes and blinks and says “Oh reely!” She regularly brings detective novels to Mr. Mortmain, “partly to keep up the fiction that he is still a famous writer.”

Which brings us to the Mortmains’ problem: Father hasn’t written a word since that famous book of his. This makes it hard to repair the precarious stairways and the leaky roof of that old castle. In fact, money has been tight for so long that they have sold everything of value, leaving the family with hardly a chair to sit on nor a plate to eat from.

They also owe quite a few months’ rent to their landlord, the squire of a neighboring estate.

When he dies, the Cottons, distant relatives from Boston, inherit his worldly goods.

The Cottons remember the famous Mortmain, his brilliant book, his whirlwind American speaking tour. And the Cottons have two handsome, eligible sons.

Need I tell you that certain Mortmain family members are desperate to impress their new American neighbors? But how do they hide their poverty, as well as Father’s bad case of writer’s block?

I Capture the Castle was a rollicking read the whole way through. If I woke anybody at my house with my sudden blasts of laughter, I’m not sorry at all.

Photo credit: Walt Stoneburner via Visualhunt.com / CC BY