Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat has a different dynamic, since it's definitely written and marketed as a fantasy novel.
How so? I'm willing to believe it is now marketed as a paranormal romance, but the original jacket copy does not treat it differently from her other novels of romantic suspense—a heroine, a mystery, an ambiguous hero—except for explaining that what used to be called the second sight is now recognized as telepathy, which could be realist in the '70's. It's on the Gothic end of her novels of romantic suspense, but it's not like Thornyhold (1988) which has explicit witchcraft and feels to me as though it falls between her Arthurian novels and her romances, or her children's novels which are fantasies. [edit] Doylistically, it makes sense to me that she wrote Touch Not the Cat in among her Merlin novels, but it's otherwise a return to form.
Are you thinking of Emily's Quest perhaps as the novel that doesn't work for you?
Yes; that was just mistyping as I tried to rebuild my comment.
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Date: 2024-04-09 03:26 pm (UTC)How so? I'm willing to believe it is now marketed as a paranormal romance, but the original jacket copy does not treat it differently from her other novels of romantic suspense—a heroine, a mystery, an ambiguous hero—except for explaining that what used to be called the second sight is now recognized as telepathy, which could be realist in the '70's. It's on the Gothic end of her novels of romantic suspense, but it's not like Thornyhold (1988) which has explicit witchcraft and feels to me as though it falls between her Arthurian novels and her romances, or her children's novels which are fantasies. [edit] Doylistically, it makes sense to me that she wrote Touch Not the Cat in among her Merlin novels, but it's otherwise a return to form.
Are you thinking of Emily's Quest perhaps as the novel that doesn't work for you?
Yes; that was just mistyping as I tried to rebuild my comment.