This link-up is hosted by Books Are My Favourite and Best, and was inspired by Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy. In his 1929 short story, “Chains”, Karinthy coined the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’. The phrase was popularized by a 1990 play written by John Guare, which was later made into a film starring Stockard Channing.

On the first Saturday of every month, Kate chooses a book as a starting point and links that book to six others forming a chain. Bloggers and readers are invited to join in and the beauty of this mini-challenge is that I can decide how and why I make the links in my chain.

August’s starting book is Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. You no doubt know that this is a story of the plague in the year 1666. When one village receives an infected bolt of cloth from Europe, they decide to isolate themselves from the world in order to prevent the spread of plague to their neighbours. Year of Wonders is perhaps Brooks’ best known book, but the book the won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is

1. March in which she imagines the Civil War experiences of Marmee’s husband, and the March sisters’ (Meg, Jo, Beth & Amy) father. It is a stunning story, and I believe that Brooks based the character loosely on Amos Bronson Alcott, father of real-life author Louisa May who wrote

2. Little Women (Kindle edition free on Amazon). I’m certain this link did not surprise you. This classic story of one year in the lives of the March sisters of New England during the American Civil War justly holds its place of honour in American literary tradition. We likely all know that the character of Jo March was the author’s alter-ego.

3. In The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, the only book in this chain that I have not read, the author Kelly O’Connor McNees, mixes fact and fiction to return to the summer of 1855 when Louisa was twenty-two. The cover promises that it is “a richly imagined, remarkably written story of the woman who created [Little Women]”.

4. From the LOST summer, we move a link to LAst Summer in Louisburg by Claire Mowat. The fortress of Louisburg is on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s been partially rebuilt and is a National Historic Site which employs scores of young people every summer to act in character throughout the fort. This book is a novel for young teens and centres on fifteen-year-old Andrea Baxter who obtains just such a summer job working in the fort.

Claire Mowat was the wife of Farley Mowat, famed Canadian author, who left a prodigious oeuvre of non-fiction books about Canada, its people, its wildlife, and its geography. He is perhaps best known for The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float and

5. Never Cry Wolf. This book is based on naturalist Mowat’s work for the Canadian government’s Wildlife Service which in the 1950s sent him north to assess the slaughter of caribou by wolves. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their ways.

Never Cry Wolf should be required reading in every secondary school in Canada, and perhaps the US. It was made into a movie starring Charles Martin Smith and Brian Dennehy in 1983.

The cover on this reissue of Never Cry Wolf is a crime and I wonder how people in publishing who have never read a book are allowed to choose a cover. Nonetheless, the cover leads me to my last link:

6. White Fang (free Kindle edition on Amazon), a classic novel by Jack London first published in 1906. It takes place in the Yukon Territories and Northwest Territories of Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. White Fang, whose mother was half-wolf, is a fighting dog (hence the cover) who inherits a new owner who domesticates him.

So that’s my chain of six degrees: from a seventeenth century English village to nineteenth century Arctic Canada in six links. What do you think?

Why not visit Kate’s blog and see how she made the final connection to The Muse?
 

P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.