I read Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson in July and finished the second book in the trilogy, Miss Buncle Married, this past week.
The first book details Miss Barbara Buncle’s sticky situation that results after she writes a fiction book based on the people in her little English village and that book becomes a best seller.
Before long people in the village begin to recognize themselves and chaos erupts but luckily Barbara has used a pseudonym, so no one knows she wrote the book.
There is a bit of a spoiler to even give the title of the second book, but, yes, Barbara does marry at the end of the first book – hence the title of Miss Buncle Married.
I found the first book, very charming, engaging, and full of humor which is why I wanted to read the second book and continue Barbara’s adventures.
I read the second book in the trilogy with my friend Cat of Cat’s Wire.
In this second book, Miss Buncle is now Mrs. Abbott and is living in a new town. She and her husband, Arthur, are enjoying themselves until they become so popular in the social scene that they get overwhelmed with never having a night off from a party, a dinner, or a game of cards. This prompts them to look for a new house in a new village, and that gives readers a new cast of characters and a new adventure to enjoy.
Here is a quick description from Goodreads: “In this charming follow-up to Miss Buncle’s Book, readers will follow Barbara Buncle’s journey into married life in a new town filled with fascinating neighbors…who may become the subjects of Barbara’s next novel! Miss Buncle may have settled down, but she’s already discovered that married life has done nothing to prevent her from getting into humorous mix-ups and hilarious hijinx. Readers will continue to fall in love with Barbara as she hilariously navigates an exciting new beginning.”
There are misunderstandings and confusion which create hilarious scenes throughout the book. The addition of Arthur and Barbara’s partying and shiftless nephew, Sam, and lecherous artist neighbor creates even more craziness and upheaval throughout the book.
Barbara has essentially retired from writing in this book after all the drama that evolved from her first two books.
She has decided she will no longer write any books. In this book, however, the writing bug bites her again.
In some ways I felt like we got to know the people of the town and their stories more in the first book, but this book provided us with a more intimate look at Barbara herself and how she thinks and her and Arthur’s relationship.
As in the first book, this book also provided a look into Barbara’s writing process, which is also the writing process of many other authors. As a writer myself, I especially enjoyed reading about how Barbara couldn’t avoid writing about her new neighbors, even though she tried not to. There was just something in her that made her feel like she needed to create a fictionalized version of the town and the people in it. When she started writing she became a feral mad woman who couldn’t leave her room until all her ideas were written down. I can relate to this feeling quite a bit.
What’s funny is how often Barbara and Arthur both claim throughout the book that Barbara doesn’t have an imagination, but she creates entire scenarios that jump off the situations involving the people in the village and that’s still imagination to me.
They both claim she doesn’t have an imagination because she has to base her ideas of the situations she experiences or hears about around her but this is ridiculous, of course, because all Barbara needs is a little idea and she’s off. I think that’s a biggest “joke” of the book.
I like both of these books individually but I love them even more as a whole story, read back-to back. Miss Buncle Married feels more like a continuation of the first book, as it should, rather than a separate book and I am glad to have that because I did want to read more about Miss Buncle.
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