Read January 2015

Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither —Benjamin Franklin

This is the third book in the Small Change series and, this time, shouldn't be read without reading both of the previous books. The events of Farthing are directly relevant to the plot, and Ha'penny explains how the characters, particularly Carmichael, reached the positions they're in.
This time the young girl is Elvira, Carmichael's ward. She has been fostered with a family who felt to me somewhere on the border between upper-middle class and the bottom of high class, and as Half a Crown opens, she's entirely wrapped up in her upcoming debut
An outstanding strength of this series is Walton's ability to use a somewhat bubbly and apparently shallow narrator, concerned initially entirely with her own life, to highlight the horror of Britain's slow slide into fascism. Nowhere is this as powerful as it is here. Elvira is a crucial few years younger and has known no other world. She sees fascism not as something fearful or as something political to ignore, but as kind of neat and a fun display
The ending to Half a Crown, it must be said, is a grand deus ex machina. Walton adds a third political actor at the very end of the story who extracts a somewhat implausible happy ending from a bleak situation. Despite realizing generally what was going to happen a bit in advance of the ending, I found it jarring. That said,I loved this book.


About the author
Walton was born in Aberdare, in the Cynon Valley of Wales. She went to Park School in Aberdare, then Aberdare Girls’ Grammar School. She lived for a year in Cardiff and went to Howell's School Llandaff, then finished her education at Oswestry School in Shropshire, and at the University of Lancaster. She lived in London for two years, lived in Lancaster until 1997, then moved to Swansea, where she lived until moving to Canada in 2002

on a bistro table

Known to most of us as the Westmount Greenhouse, the Westmount Conservatory is the city’s only Victorian greenhouse. It is one of Westmount’s brightest and most colourful spots and was built in 1927 by greenhouse manufacturers Lord & Burnham, who also built the New York Botanical Garden