Six Degrees of Separation: From Second Place to The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

The first Saturday of the month is time to play Six Degrees of Separation. This meme is hosted by Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best. The aim is to link six books to each other from the starting point.

This month the starting point is Second Place by Rachel Cusk, a novel I haven't read, in which an artist plays a major role.

Art and painting is the obvious way to go for that first link, and indeed that's where I'm heading with this novel by another Rachel, The Glass Painter's Daughter by Rachel Hore. The story does involve painting, but in a different medium: stained glass.

Creating pictures of glass leads me to animals made of glass in Tennessee William's popular play The Glass Menagerie. Whilst I haven't read the play, I do remember the 1950 film starring Kirk Douglas. Amongst her collection of glass animals perhaps Laura, one of the main characters, had some sea creatures which takes me to my next link.

The Glass Ocean was the first collaboration between Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White that I read. It is set during the late Edwardian era on board the doomed RMS Lusitania. Another first, also set in the late Edwardian era, is Lucy Ribchester's debut novel The Hourglass Factory. Frankie George, a female journalist, is sent to interview a trapeze artist, which leads her to a corsetry shop, a mystery and many unusual people. Nothing is as it seems.

While an hourglass figure is a description of a female body shape, an hourglass records the passage of time. Time features in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, although it goes backwards. Like Frankie, Alice finds nothing is as it seems.

Looking-glass is an old term for a mirror, which brings me to my final link, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie. This is a Miss Marple mystery and one of the few that I've read. That's my post for this month. I've gone (very carefully with all that glass around) from a novel I haven't read to an old favourite, linking them primarily through the word glass.

Next month (October 2, 2021), the starting point will be The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.