Book for August

Our Book for August is I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, chosen by Jocelyn.

From Amazon:

Now a major motion picture from the Academy Award-winning producer of Shakespeare in Love

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"--and the heart of the reader--in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

From Wikipedia:

I Capture the Castle is the first novel by English author Dodie Smith, written in the 1940s when she and her husband (also British and a conscientious objector) lived in California during WWII. She longed for England and wrote of a happier time—unspecified in the novel (apart from a reference to living in the 30's) but probably early in that decade — between the wars. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty 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—a coming-of-age story in which she is visibly maturing and by the end is no longer a girl but a young woman. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 82 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.