A Celebration of the Seasons
Author: Lia Leendertz
Publisher: Octopus Publishing
Available: 9th May 2024 in hardback
Thank you to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours and Octopus Publishing for my beautiful, gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone.
Book Details
A Year in Story and Song is a captivating collection of stories and songs that celebrates the seasons.
We humans love stories. We love to hear them and to tell them, around fires and by bedsides, and we love to use them to make sense of the world around us. The seasons, in all their ever-changing variety, give us many opportunities for storytelling: the full moons and their names, Epiphany in January, St Patrick’s Day in March, May Day, Midsummer, Halloween and more. They feature mischievous boggarts and fairies, saints and sailors, leprechauns and dragons, pilgrimages and charms, milk maids and rose queens, Robin Hood and the green man. The songs range from shanties and love songs, to bawdy ballads and wassails, to carols and rounds, and have been sung for hundreds of years, often at particular moments in the calendar.
This is a book to treasure all year, every year
My Thoughts:
When I pulled my copy of A Year in Story & Song by Lia Leendertz from it’s post bag, my breath caught in my throat, in sheer joy. I was holding in my bookish paws, a book of beauty, with incredibly detailed gold images etched into its green cover. It is regal in appearance and there are so many details, from the contents of the book all over it. I have had immense fun, picking them out and I have spent some time admiring the covers of this little gem. Lia has created, collated and crafted a wealth of material in this divinely detailed little tome, and I absolutely love it!
This book is quite an unusual choice for me, I haven’t read, nor do I own many anthologies of any type. But I was fascinated by the description of this book, which detailed, a mixture of stories and songs, of folk law and of facts. It isn’t necessarily, a book you have to read from cover to cover either. I have my copy on my desk and every day since it arrived, I have dipped into it, reading a story here and there but in no particular order, which is a unique experience from me! Normally, I am a very conformist and structured reader, who usually starts at the beginning of every book, and it would never cross my mind, just to flick through a book, pausing to read a bit here and there!! However, this book encourages you to do just that, I have been surprisingly liberated by this way of reading!
The book is divided in to the 12 months of the year from January to December and each month’s opening page, has a wood cut image that reflects images or motifs reflecting the essence of the month and they are all stunning, but I am particularly fond of April, September and October. You will be surprised how long, you will spend looking at these images, and reflecting on what you see and referring back to the images once you’ve read each of the literary elements of the month. Each month provides the reader, with the naming of the month, it’s title in different languages from the British isles, from Scottish Gaelic, to Welsh, to Manx, to Cornish and then there is a simple eloquent description of the naming of the month, for example, we are in May (Page 57), which is likely to be a derivative of the Roman month Maius, which has links to the goddess of spring and fertility, Maia. Then there are connections to Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival celebrated on 1st May as it is just about halfway between the Spring equinox and the Summer Solstice and Beltane was a fire festival, and any fires lit on this day, were supposed to have magical/protective qualities. May is also considered the start or beginning of the months of growth (aka the summer months). The volume of information about each month is deliciously fascinating, and I am completely awash with monthly information now, which I adore!
Every month in the book also contains songs/shanties/poems that have their traditions linked to the appropriate months; April has a sea shanty, titled A Wife in Every Port and August references a song for harvest, titled John Barleycorn, which personifies barley and gets a little violent in parts and July has a sailors song titled The Mermaid but rather than a shanty or working song, it’s a ballad, sung at times of rest and tells of how the sighting of a mermaid, is a forewarning of doom! So consider yourself warned!
One of the many elements of this gorgeous book, that I was completely captivated by, are the charms for the month pages – March’s is the Four-Leaf Clover, which charmingly explains, why they are considered lucky, which is because of their scarcity because only 1 in 5000 plants has an extra leaf and why there is a connection to Ireland and the phrase ‘ the Luck of the Irish’… November’s is Pudding Charm’s explaining the last Sunday before Advent, is called Stir Up Sunday, when traditionally Christmas puddings were made to ensure they were properly matured before the big day, plus did you know that there are precisely 13 ingredients in a Christmas pudding, to reflect Jesus and his 12 disciples and when mixing the ingredients, they should be stirred directionally from East to West to represent the journey of the magi (3 kings) but if you want to know more, then you will have to buy the book and find out for yourselves and trust me you will not be disappointed.
This little book is truly a treasure trove and a sumptuously detailed read, it is opulent and original, it is both a visual and an intellectual treat, every page I’ve read, has taught me something I didn’t know or reminded me of fact or folk law that I have forgotten. I cannot praise Lia more highly for all her skill and hard work in researching all the information and arranging it perfectly and writing so elegantly and succinctly about myriad of things from fairies to corn dollies; from the Wolf Moon to the Hunter’s Moon; from stories concerning Red Handkerchiefs, Merlin’s Apples to Wigilia and the Animals . I have fallen completely in love with this book, and I think if you treat yourself to a copy, you will too. This would be the perfect present for anyone with an enquiring mind, so you may just need to buy two, one for you and one for a friend. I hope you love it as much as I do!
Happy Reading Bookophiles…
About the Author:
Lia Leendertz is an award-winning garden and food writer based in Bristol. She presents a monthly podcast, ‘As the Season Turns’, about what to look out for in the month ahead and writes a free monthly newsletter, ‘Lia’s Living Almanac’, which you can sign up for at the address below. Her reinvention of the traditional rural almanac has become an annual must-have for readers eager to connect with the seasons, appreciate the outdoors and discover ways to mark and celebrate each month.
instagram.com/lia_leendertz
twitter.com/lialeendertz
lialeendertz.substack.com
Please do read some of the other reviews from this blog tour.
The Fallen Librarian Reviews 