The Blue Sapphire

4.5, such good fun! I love Julia’s courageous steps into independence and her combination of common sense, competence, and naïveté. Stephen is a dear. (As was his mother!) Neil is a kick. Uncle Ran is a pet. Morland reminds me of Edward Yardley from Venetia by Georgette Heyer. 😠 The story reminds me......more

Julia Harburn lives with her emotionally distant father and young stepmother in London. She's engaged to the very suitable and proper Morland Beverley and the couple are waiting for him to get a partnership in his father's firm before marrying. When Morland is late meeting Julia in Kensington Garden......more

4 1/2 Julia has grown up in a house, not a home. Her mother is dead, and now that she thinks about it, she doesn't believe she died happy. Her father is a puzzle, he stays locked up in his study, a brown blanket wrapped around him, nursing some hidden pain that Julia is never allowed to see. When s......more

Delicious reading on a snowy day. Finished it in about a day. One of D.E. Stevenson's best. Julia is sitting on a park bench waiting for her fiancé (a prim, selfish dictator of a man), when along comes Stephen and sits next to her. Stephen is recently returned from diamond mines in South Africa and kn......more