One of the best parts about touring around the country to various bookfairs is that you get to go to bookstores!

I’ve been making my way through some of the books I picked up in Halifax (at some of the best stores in Canada: Bookmark Halifax and Woozles Children’s Bookstore), and hugely enjoying them. By some twist of fate, Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret Countess is about a young woman working as a maid in a great house, just after World War One, and Selina Todd’s The People is a history of the British working class, which spends a fair bit of time discussing the situation of… young women who work as maids! This all ties in pretty nicely with The Toucan Brothers, which is an excellent look at undercutting in the plumbing industry (all told in rhyming verse, of course)!

The Secret Countess
by Eva Ibbotson

The People
The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd

The Toucan Brothers
by Tor Freeman

-Ali