Book excerpt: Primrose Past recreates, with rare authenticity and engaging spirit, the diary of a young girl growing up in Victorian England -- a time of simple manners and values, when life was lived slowly and morals were passed on from generation to generation through homilies and by example. The young lady of the story -- fifteen years of age in 1848, the year of the journal -- narrates in a fresh and endearing voice a year in the life of a Victorian family, offering a window into the lifestyle of the time; along the way she even includes recipes for dishes she learns from the family cook over the course of the year (authentic 19th-century recipes the author discovered in the course of her research). But the story, deceptively simple at first, soon takes on an air of suspense, as her parents leave on a journey, and her father writes with the news that her mother has taken gravely ill; soon thereafter the little girl -- identified only by the nickname "cygnet", or young swan, in the diary -- finds a letter among her mother's belongings leading her to question her own parentage. The text of the journal is framed by a present-day narrative, in Caroline's own voice, detailing the discovery of the actual diary, and Caroline's own attempts to discover the truth behind this enigmatic story.