It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.
This March we start with a classic in celebration of its being made into a new film – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
first degree
A much more recent book that focuses on the next generation left to deal with its family’s mess (some things never change) is The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell.
second degree
The Family Upstairs includes an inherited house. The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware also centers on an inherited house and the young woman who inherits it.
third degree
A house is a straightforward form of legacy to be left in a will. But things get more complicated when the person leaving the legacy is an artist. The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins deals with all the entanglements that arise when an artist leaves her house and her personal diaries to a friend and her artworks to a gallery.
fourth degree
Sometimes a family legacy includes a big, fat secret. Such is the case in Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson.
fifth degree
From cake we move to another delicious dessert with Alan Bradley’s novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
This novel features the most annoying fictional child character I’ve ever come across, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce.
sixth degree
From an 11-year-old we switch to May and Cass, two 10-year-old girls who are best friends as well as cousins. These two, who are nowhere near as annoying as Flavia, appear in Mary Kubica’s latest thriller, It’s Not Her.
The past has a way of reasserting itself in the present, as this exercise in 6 Degrees of Separation demonstrates. I look forward to reading what ground your 6 Degrees journey covers this month.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
Lovely. I like how concise your list is, and it all makes perfect sense!