osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: mary stewart

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have completed my trip through Mary Stewart’s oeuvre with Thunder on the Right! Probably not the book I would have chosen to end on; it’s one of her earlier books and, as the characters themselves note, rather melodramatic: ( spoilers )

However, I know that I’ll be revisiting some of Stewart’s books, so this is not really the end of the journey at all. I own A Walk in Wolf Wood, and someday I WILL find a copy of Ludo and the Star Horse.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in David Copperfield! David has run away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who has taken him in, and when David’s evil stepfather Mr. Murdstone came to collect David, she soundly rated him for the way that he treated David and David’s poor dear dead mother both. YES AUNT TROTWOOD GO GO GO.

What I Plan to Read Next

Nancy Springer’s I Am Morgan La Fay and I Am Mordred. Judging by the cover of I Am Morgan La Fay these are going to be Arthuriana by way of 90s emo and I’m fascinated to see how this mash-up works.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s last Arthurian novel, The Prince and the Pilgrim, which is based on the medieval Arthurian legend of Alisander, who sets out to avenge his father’s death and go to Camelot… and neither avenges his father’s death nor ever makes it to Camelot, but instead marries the Pretty Pilgrim, who takes one look at him and informs him, “I love you.”

In Stewart’s version, Alexander is the one who takes one look at Alice and instantly announces he loves her - not twelve hours after he last rose from Morgan La Fay’s bed. OH ALEXANDER. There’s a bit where his mom is like “Thank God he’s pretty because he’s not very smart,” and it’s fortunate that Alice will be in a position to do his thinking for him forthwith.

I also read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, which is a collection of the letters that he wrote for his children from Father Christmas and Father Christmas’s various helper, like the North Polar Bear and the elf secretary Ilbereth. As they were written over a period of almost two decades, there isn’t an overarching story per se, but rather the ongoing happenings of life at the North Pole, such as North Polar Bear’s various scrapes.

The copy I read includes facsimiles of the letters (each character has his own distinctive handwriting: Father Christmas’s is shaky because he’s old, North Polar Bear writes a blocky hand because he’s writing with his paw, etc.), plus Tolkien’s beautiful illustrations. A Christmas feast.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been struggling to keep up with my email reading commitments! Whale Weekly has suddenly become Whale Almost Daily (and a chunk of chapters each day, at that! Ishmael and Queequeg are already sharing a bed like newlyweds), the letters from The Lightning Conductor are flying thick and fast, AND the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet arrived from Letters from Watson, which wasn’t supposed to start till January 1st! Oh my.

The daily Christmas Carol installments, however, continue just the right size. Scrooge has just bid farewell to the Ghost of Christmas Present, but not before being introduced to the Ghost’s terrifying hangers-on, the wretched children Ignorance and Want. One of the few scenes that didn’t make it into The Muppet Christmas Carol! Perhaps the filmmakers thought it interrupted the Ghost’s leave-taking.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been enjoying A Christmas Carol so much that I’m taking the plunge on David Copperfield.

littlerhymes and I have finished Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day! To my surprise, this was my favorite book of the quartet, because I got deeply invested in Mordred the lonely watchful child who would rather die than hurt Arthur, and also has to ride herd on all his horrible Orkney half-brothers.

(Side note about the Orkney boys: Gareth is, as usual, the sweetheart of the gang. Indeed, Stewart notes that as long as he stayed on Orkney, where he was his mother's pet, he was "in danger of effeminacy" - which is perhaps why he escapes the toxic masculinity that destroys the rest of them. Usually Gawain is the second-best Orkney boy, but here he's just as vengeful and hotheaded as Gaheris and Agrivaine. Sometimes you see a decent Gaheris, but no one in the entire world of Arthurian adaptations seems to like Agrivaine.)

Unfortunately, the book falls apart in the third section, I think because Stewart also got invested in Mordred, Basically a Good Kid Which Is Impressive Considering His Life. Her heart is not in Mordred's destruction of Camelot, but unfortunately she's written herself in a corner where she has to write it, as in the Merlin trilogy she firmly established a) Merlin's prophecy that Mordred would destroy Arthur, and b) Merlin's infallibility as a prophet.

She tries to soften the blow: Mordred's final confrontation with Arthur takes place as a result of a series of misunderstandings. Mordred is Arthur's heir, so when he hears that Arthur is dead he naturally takes over the kingdom, but Arthur is not dead, and when he comes back to England a storm forces him to land on Saxon ground... which leads to a battle with the Saxons, with whom Mordred unfortunately just made an alliance... which ends with Mordred and Arthur facing off in battle.

And then they have a final parlay, which Stewart doesn't show us (they died right after! no one knows what they said! YOU COULD TELL US ANYWAY), and reach an agreement... and then an adder bites a knight and the knight draws his sword to kill it and the soldiers take that as a sign for battle to begin and THAT IS THAT.

In the afterword she notes that the only historical information we have about Mordred is that he died at Camlann with Arthur, in a context where he might just as easily have been fighting on Arthur's side as against him, and she might have followed that route if she hadn't locked herself with all those prophecies. I think the book would have been stronger for it if she had - or else if she had Mordred betray Arthur at least a little. It feels too easy, too much letting the characters off the hook, for it to all be just a misunderstanding.

***

Also I am 99% convinced that Elizabeth Wein read this book to absolute shreds when she was young, because her Medraut so feels like a darkfic version of Stewart's (in particular, an expansion of the scene where Morgause kisses Mordred, when he is not yet aware that he's her son but she definitely knows. How did you expect that to pan out, Morgause! Did you assume he would never know!), and also a fix-it where Medraut doesn't cause the fall of Camelot after all - although Camelot still falls.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wasn’t particularly invested in the characters or the plot in Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, which would usually be a death knell for a story, but in this case I grew so absorbed by the worldbuilding that it pulled me through the book. What IS this world where the way to propose is to offer a marriage toy, where wizards often give banquets by transforming simple foods like potatoes into costly delicacies, where people use kinship terms as courtesy titles? “Tell me more!” I begged. “PLEASE give me some infodumps!”

Karr did not hear my plea for infodumps, but apparently the ebook has an afterword which gives a bit more detail about the worldbuilding. (Genuinely considering buying the ebook just to read the afterword.) Apparently, the afterword also mentions that the book is stealth Ruddigore fanfic, although in that way where you start with a canon and then put your story in a completely different setting, and change some of the characterization, and add a self-insert for your favorite character to fall in love with, and somehow by the end no one but yourself can see the Ruddigore at all.

I also read Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal. I read the rest of the Brothers Sinister series seven years ago, and unfortunately the delay before reading the last book was a mistake. I’ve forgotten most of the characters from the earlier books and also am just not in the same headspace where I originally found the series so delightful. It’s fine! It just didn’t grab my heart like the others.

What I’m Reading Now

Whale Weekly has begun! I didn’t realize that we were beginning our Moby-Dick journey so early! …and I have the sinking feeling that I’m going to find Melville just as insufferable now as I did in high school, but I will give it a few weeks before I make any decisions about whether I truly WANT to spent the next three years of my life revisiting Moby-Dick.

In other news,

littlerhymes and I have been reading The Wicked Day, and I’ve been having Mordred feelings YET AGAIN, just like when I read The Winter Prince and The Idylls of the Queen… Oh, God, have I become a Mordred stan? I don’t want to be a Mordred stan. And yet HERE I AM, unable to break free, just like poor Mordred who doesn’t want to be the doom of Camelot and yet that is his FATE.

What I Plan to Read Next

As you may have noticed I am really on a roll with these Newbery Honor books, and I intend to keep going as long as the inspiration is upon me.

I’m leaving for my trip to Massachusetts tomorrow! So I’m posting my Wednesday Reading Meme today to sweep the decks clean before I go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment, the final book of the original Merlin trilogy, although Stewart went ahead and published a fourth book a few years later. The Last Enchantment nonetheless feels like a conclusion - I’d be certainly very surprised if Merlin narrates the next book - for it takes us through the end of Merlin’s story, and indeed beyond the usual end: he’s buried alive in his crystal cave, as is his usual end, but here he’s rescued and at the end of the book is living in retirement, an old man tired yet content, frequently visited by the king.

We were particularly interested in the book’s ambiguous treatment of Nimue. Is she truly in love with Merlin? Pretending to love him to steal his power? Not stealing his power at all, but learning all his skills so she can take up his mantel as Arthur’s sorcerer, just as Merlin bade her?

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, alternates between Billy Prior, who is headed back to the front now that he’s been released from Craiglockhart, and his counselor Rivers, who spends most of the book ill to the point of delirium, recollecting his fieldwork among the headhunters of Melanesia. The colonial rulers of Melanesia had forbidden headhunting, and because their entire culture had been organized around the headhunt, they were basically pining away in despair.

Rivers doesn’t draw a direct parallel, but there’s clearly a meditation here about war as a bearer of cultural meaning - whose cultural meaning is perhaps divorced from anything that a reasonable person might consider a “war aim.” The point of the headhunt is the headhunt. It’s not meant to win territory or settle a point of politics by other means or Defeat Autocracy; the point is to take heads. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

( Spoilers )

Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, also featuring a cleric who travels the countryside collecting knowledge/stories, also very concerned with how stories change depending who tell them. In this case, Chih is telling the story of a human-tiger romance to a trio of tigers who may eat them… or might leave Chih alive to go home and correct the record with what the tigers consider the real version, although they are grumpily aware that Chih will probably just put it down as a competing version, equal in weight with the clearly incorrect human story!

Finally, there’s a new Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel out! Jessi’s Secret Language is one that I read as a kid (in general I read all the Very Special Episode books about disabilities), and it was fun to revisit it now, especially because I’ve actually seen a production of Coppelia, the ballet that Jessi stars in. In fact, I think my desire to see that ballet stems from this book! (Almost all my other ballet feelings come from Princess Tutu. Someday I WILL see Swan Lake and Giselle.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula, Dracula has end-run our heroes! They have now split up to chase him, one team by land and one by waterway… Will they be able to kill him before he reaches his castle stronghold??

What I Plan to Read Next

To my distress, I have discovered that I weeded Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window from my collection! So I’ll only be taking The Fledgling and the recently-acquired The Astonishing Stereoscope to Massachusetts with me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week’s Wednesday Reading Meme brought to you by

littlerhymes! We have finished Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills! I enjoyed it more than The Crystal Cave: Merlin spends way less time getting kicked in the face by life, and everything bucks up once young Arthur appears on the scene. Love his friend Bedwyr with his little crush on Arthur! (You really don’t see much of Bedwyr in most recent adaptations. Is it because the name Bedwyr sounds goofy to modern ears?)

littlerhymes also sent me Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Stolen Ponies, a pony book from the 1970s in which the five children set out to find out who is stealing the ponies on the moors… only for one of the children to get dreadfully lost, which takes up most of the rest of the book, until he stumbles on the pony thief by accident! The plotting is odd and meandering and the characterization not very sharp - especially for the ponies, who are interchangeable as bicycles.

What I’m Reading Now

littlerhymes and I have begun The Last Enchantments! We have concluded that the entire fall of Camelot could have been avoided if Merlin had kidnapped Mordred and had him raised by some kindly country squire, rather like Arthur himself. Alas there is no way to communicate this conclusion to Merlin himself, so unfortunately he’s still on a collision course to maybe attempting to drown a baby.

In The Wounded Name, Aymar has been reunited with his cousin/ladylove, whom he insists on not explaining the true reason for his disgrace, as it occurred in part because he thought she was in danger of being executed as a spy! I’m sure this will not backfire on him in any way.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dracula front - the calm before the storm, of course - which has given me time to reflect that when I first read this in high school I thought it was a typical Victorian novel. Reading it now, with greater understanding of Victorian literature, I can see that while none of the details specifically are atypical, the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been writing up a storm this month, which doesn’t leave much time for reading, so I’ve jettisoned my goal of clearing off my TBR shelf before I head to Massachusetts at the beginning of November. My new goal is to polish off the books I’ve got out from the library: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History (last of the Newbery Honors for a while!), and Mary Renault’s North Face.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled. I really meant to save this final Mrs. Pollifax book for a rainy day… but I felt an overwhelming urge to read it now, and who am I to resist an overwhelming urge? Gilman brought back John Sebastian Farrell to team up with Mrs. Pollifax for the denouement, thus bringing the series full circle from Mrs. Pollifax’s first adventure with Farrell. A satisfying end.

As this is the last Mrs. Pollifax book, I figured it was now or never on Mrs. Pollifax - Spy, the Mrs. Pollifax movie starring Rosalind Russell as Mrs. Pollifax. Russell is a goddamn delight, but I was sorry ( Spoilers )

Last January I bombed out of Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, but I gave it another try with

littlerhymes and we powered through! It helped perhaps that I went into it knowing that this is going to be the book where Everyone Is Mean to Merlin, and not in a tragic woobie way either: that’s just how the bannock crumbles in the harsh world of Dark Ages Britain.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth Brooks’ The Orphan of Salt Winds, a delicious novel which has performed the difficult feat of making both its historical and its modern-day plotlines equally gothic. On the eve of World War II, orphan Virginia is adopted by the young couple who own the seaside house Salt Winds, in what the reader quickly senses is a doomed attempt to save their rickety marriage. In the modern day, Virginia in her old age finds a curlew skull on the doorstep of Salt Winds, which she believes is a sign that tomorrow night she must walk into the marsh to drown… No idea where this is headed, but loving every minute of it.

In Dracula, Lucy has DIED. Could this all have been avoided if Van Helsing had been a literal more liberal in sharing information so that everyone was on the same page about the necessity of the garlic flowers and keeping a constant watch over her at night? MAYBE.

littlerhymes and I also agreed that PERHAPS if Mina had been summoned, her blood might have saved Lucy: the love of a good woman etc. Lucy Westenra, killed by heteronormativity…

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Merlin Chronicles!

What I’m Just Finished Reading

As a traveling companion for The Once and Future King

skygiants kindly sent Fay Grissom’s Portrait in Jigsaw, a gothic novel from 1975 which is simply A Lot. After the death of our heroine Alisdair’s mother, Alisdair’s grim father had Alisdair raised in seclusion on a remote Scottish estate. But when Alisdair emerges for her debut on her twenty-first birthday, she discovers that her mother Mai is not dead! And in fact is an internationally famous modernist novelist! Whose brilliant novels won a Nobel prize! And also she’s a Thai princess!!!

I kept expecting this last thing to turn into a trainwreck, and there’s definitely a classic 1970s “is this an attempt to critique racism or just plain racism?” moment (which is a huge and intensely convoluted spoiler), but for the most part Mai is a riff on Bohemian Writer of Modernist Novels tropes and generally the best part of the book.

I also read Mary Stewart’s Airs above the Ground, an enchanting book about Austria, and particularly about Lipizzaner horses. (The titular “airs above the ground” refer to certain maneuvers that the horses do: rearing like cavalry statues, jumping in the air and seeming to float, etc.) As is customary with a Mary Stewart book I now desperately want to visit Austria and see the Lipizzaners and try the sachertorte.

As is less customary, we start the book with the heroine already married! She and her husband start the book at odds but swiftly join forces and realize that they have each married someone even cooler than they initially realized.

It was perhaps unfair to Rebecca Serle’s One Italian Summer to read it so close to a Mary Stewart book, because while Serle’s book is a perfectly serviceable novel/travel book, it doesn’t quite achieve the “I want to pack my bags and go there NOW” that Stewart’s books manage so effortlessly. (Or rather, it looks effortless. I’m sure Stewart worked at it quite hard, actually.)

Serle’s book is packed with delicious food descriptions, AND it has a Petite Maman style plot where our heroine Katy meets her own mother from the past, so I expected to love it. But somehow the book as a whole ended up feeling like something less than the sum of its parts for me.

AND FINALLY, after leaving it to languish for a month, I finished Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. The secret seems to lie in NOT reading the book in small pieces, as it is hard to pick back up when I know that we’re going right back to, say, wounded men burning to death in the Wilderness, but to read it in big gulps.

Contemplating whether to have Russell's cavalry unit ride with Sheridan, as opposed to taking part in Sherman's March to the Sea. Sheridan seems to have been one of the few Union officers the men hero-worshipped (the literally turned around a battle by appearing at a propitious moment) and I feel like that would be an interesting phenomena to explain to college boys in the 1960s - in particular, I think it might be good for Russell to have one epic mancrush that is genuinely platonic. However, perhaps this is overegging the pudding...

What I’m Reading Now

rachelmanija kindly linked W. E. Johns page on Faded Page, which has a somewhat random selection of Biggles (read: none of the books that I’ve seen described as particularly slashy), BUT ALSO has the first four books of the Worrals series, about a plucky W.A.A.F. girl pilot Worrals and her stalwart sidekick Frecks. Worrals has been CAPTURED and Frecks is attempting a RESCUE!

What I Plan to Read Next

The next three Worrals books!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Alex Beam’s Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modernist Masterpiece is not quite as delightful as The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, but that’s a very high bar to beat and the book is still pretty fun. Edith Farnsworth was a doctor specializing in kidney research, for whom Mies van der Rohe designed the Farnsworth House, an ethereally beautiful summer cottage which turned out to be practically unlivable because (1) the walls are mostly windows made of single-plane plate glass, so the house is a greenhouse in the summer and an icebox in the winter, and (2) van der Rohe situated it on the flood plain.

I looked at pictures of the Farnsworth House and I regret to inform you that it is every bit as beautiful as every fawning architectural critic ever gushed. It does, however, raise yet again the question of whether modernist architects were designing houses or beautiful sculptures that people regrettably lived in.

(Farnsworth eventually got tired of dealing with Farnsworth House and moved to Italy, where she resided in a sumptuous villa and translated Italian poetry.)

Also Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn and Unicorn on a Roll: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure, which I’ve meant to read for ages now and it just seemed like the right time. It’s sort of Calvin and Hobbsian, except about a girl and her unicorn instead of a boy and his tiger, and it’s light and delightful and I will probably read the next eleven books of it.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m struggling with Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave. I didn’t know it was possible to struggle with a Mary Stewart book! But Merlin keeps meeting so many mean people (his new tutor just turned out to be a member of a cult that practices ritual human sacrifice, LIKE YOU DO), and there’s so much casual misogyny. I know it’s the characters and not Stewart’s, because I’ve read so many of her other books and it’s not present there… but I’m still just not in the mood for it right now.

I hate to abandon a book when I’m almost halfway through, but reading it in this mood is just not doing it justice. I’m going to put it aside and tackle the quartet another time.

In cheerier news, I’ve begun Charles Boardman Hawes’ The Great Quest, which I approached with dread because his book The Dark Frigate is probably the most boring book that ever won the Newbery Medal. But to my surprise, The Great Quest has been reasonably entertaining so far! Astonishing. Of course Hawes still has two-thirds of the book to get boring, but perhaps he’ll manage to stay interesting!

What I Plan to Read Next

Planning to burn through the rest of the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up James Otis’s Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus because Betty MacDonald included it in a list of childhood favorites in Nancy and Plum, and now I am wondering just what young Betty MacDonald saw in the book. The ratio of “fun circus hijinks” to “running away is miserable, actually” tilts definitively toward misery, and moreover, in the penultimate chapter ( Spoilers )

I’ve also finished Mary Renault’s Return to Night (less harrowing than expected! Or perhaps I’ve become inured?) and Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway (MORE harrowing than expected). But those will be getting posts of their own.

What I’m Reading Now

Halfway through Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword. This book is the only thing standing between me and finishing the 1980s Newbery Honor books so I WILL PERSEVERE, even though “after six weeks of training, hero/ine is magically better than people who have been training at this thing their whole lives” is my anti-trope. I’m sorry, Harry. It’s not you, it’s me.

In cheerier news, I’ve been super enjoying Spike Carlsen’s A Walk around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About), which offers brisk histories of various everyday objects that you see on an everyday street: alleys, garbage trucks, the asphalt in the street itself. My only complaint is that sometimes I want yet more detail, but then, if Carlsen went into great depth he wouldn’t have space for such breadth. I’m just about to start the pigeon chapter!

And I’ve begun Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave! Merlin has just discovered said Crystal Cave and had his first scrying lesson.

What I Plan to Read Next

After The Blue Sword, I’m going to take a break from the Newbery Honor project till I feel like taking it up again. This year’s crop of winners will be appearing at the end of this month, which may inspire me… or may not! We’ll see.

What I’ve Been Stymied in Reading

On Google Books, I tracked down volume 36 of The Atlantic Monthly, which has the first two numbers of William Dean Howells’ Private Theatricals. I wanted to compare the serial against the version published fifty years as Mrs. Farrell: Howells often revised his serials before publishing them as books, and I was super curious whether perhaps he toned down any of the gay bits for the 1921 audience. But actually, it seems that nothing changed but the title, which makes it easier to resign myself to the fact that volume 37 (which presumably holds the rest of the serial) does not appear to be available online.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Wikipedia claims that Mary Stewart’s novella The Wind Off the Small Isles was never published in the United States, but I managed to get a copy from Ohio through interlibrary loan, so perhaps some enterprising Ohio librarian imported a copy from Great Britain. I loved the Canary Islands setting, and there’s a wonderfully effective scene where the heroine gets trapped in a sea cave, but on the whole it does feel slighter than Stewart’s full-length novels - as if it’s a wonderfully detailed outline for a chunk of a novel, rather than quite a full thing in its own right.

I’ve also caught up on the latest BSC and BSC Little Sister graphic novels, Kristy and the Snobs and Karen’s Kittycat Club. Kristy and the Snobs turns out to be the origin story of Shannon Kilbourne, the associate member of the BSC, who as far as I was concerned parachuted into the club out of the ether. As it turns out, she got into the club after trying to sabotage Kristy’s baby-sitting efforts after Kristy moved onto Shannon’s baby-sitting turf! I kind of want to read the original novel now to see if it played up the mafia turf war aspect of this a bit more…

I surprised myself by quite enjoying Karen’s Kittycat Club! Perhaps I have at last seen the light on Karen Brewer? Perhaps I’m just easy for anything with such a high concentration of cats.

What I’m Reading Now

I picked up Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 because I wanted to learn more about the evolution of the American public’s response to the Vietnam War over the 1960s, which in fact I don’t think this book deals with very much, but that’s all right: I’ve been meaning to learn more about Vietnam and the Vietnam War ever since I read Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again. (However, I am in the market for a book that DOES focus on the American public’s response to the war, if anyone has a book to recommend.)

Anyway, the French have just created an isolated position at Dienbienphu which has no overland supply routes. They can only be resupplied by air, like the German forces when they were encircled at Stalingrad, except that the Germans got encircled because they overextended themselves whereas the French have put themselves in this precarious position on purpose. Truly human folly is boundless when people feel national prestige is on the line.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m kicking myself slightly for not thinking of E. W. Hornung’s Witching Hill in October, but I don’t want to wait another year and early November still feels spooky, so I’m going to read it anyway.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ludo and the Star Horse, which I loved! All I knew about the book when I began was that it was a mid-twentieth century children’s fantasy written by Mary Stewart, and I loved the process of discovering what it was about, but in case you want a bit more detail, ( Spoilers )

At long last I have FINISHED Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad! Discovered that many of the German POWs remained in prison camps (possibly even more awful than the usual run of Soviet prison camps: apparently in the POW camps, cannibalism was rife) until 1955. Keeping POWs for a decade after the war seems excessive.

Newbery Honor book this week: Mavis Jukes’ Like Jake and Me, a sweet but forgettable story about a young boy who likes ballet bonding with his tough manly stepfather when it turns out the stepfather is afraid of spiders.

What I’m Reading Now

regshoe is hosting a Flight of the Heron readalong - two chapters a week, although this week is just the Prologue - and as the books is available as a free ebook, I couldn’t resist joining in, even though I did literally just read it. Never too soon to revisit the slashy Jacobites!

I’ve also begun rereading William Dean Howells’ The Coast of Bohemia, about girl art students in New York in the 1890s, which I read years ago and inexplicably never posted about. This book is a trip and a half and also an amazing resource, and I still remember Cornelia and Charmian’s friendship fondly.

"Well, I hope you're not conventional! Nobody's conventional here."

"I don't believe I'm conventional enough to hurt," said Cornelia.

"You have humor, too," said Miss Maybough, thoughtfully, as if she had been mentally cataloguing her characteristics. "You'll be popular."

Cornelia stared at her and turned to her drawing.

"But you're proud," said the other, "I can see that. I adore pride. It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?"

Cornelia wanted to laugh; at the same time she wondered what new kind of crazy person she had got with; this was hardly one of the art-students that went wild from overwork. Miss Maybough kept on without waiting to be answered: "I haven't got a bit of pride, myself. I could just let you walk over me. How does it feel to be proud? What are you proud for?"

What I Plan to Read Next

I will probably not actually be reading this next, but now that I’ve remembered how much I enjoy Mary Stewart’s fantasy, I’m really excited to read her Merlin Chronicles someday.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A few weeks ago

troisoiseaux mentioned reading Boris Pasternak’s I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography, and of course upon hearing that it was full of tidbits about writers and artists that Pasternak knew, I just had to read it. The tidbits truly are tidbits; the book is, as it says, a sketch, and overall I just wanted more detail about everyone (particular Marina Tsvetaeva), but still it was fascinating to catch this glimpse of Russia before the Revolution.

I also finished E. M. Delafield’s The War-Workers, and boy, does Delafield have a lot of Feelings about women war workers and how women’s war work is SO important but also not MORE important than fulfilling women’s traditional sphere in the home, and also that work (particularly war work) should be done for the sake of the work itself and not for self-aggrandisement, which I don’t disagree with, but it feels uncomfortably gendered here.

This is one of Delafield’s earliest novels, which may account for the occasional clumsiness with which it hammers its themes. It already displays Delafield’s deft grasp of character, however. I particularly enjoyed Char Vivian’s devoted secretary Miss Delmege, who frequently drives her fellow workers mad with her superior airs and delicate sensibilities, like the evening that she retreats upstairs in genteel dismay when one of the girls brings her camisole into the parlor to mend: "Well," she said gently, "underwear in the sitting-room, you know!"

This is the sort of person who is MUCH more enjoyable in fiction than real life, but it’s a lot of fun to see her pretensions gently skewered.

Oh! And I also finished Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic. What a good read. I am happy to inform you that our heroine ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, recommended by

philomytha as an extremely slashy Victorian novel. It’s narrated by the titular John Halifax’s bff Phineas Fletcher, and by the end of the very first chapter Phineas is making David & Jonathan comparisons, so this is absolute gold.

Also, I realized I could make the characters in one of my projects Golden Age mystery aficionados (only for the early Golden Age, though; the book is set in 1927), so I’ve dived into Agatha Christie with The Man in the Brown Suit. The book is narrated primarily by Anne Bedingfield, a recently orphaned girl who is determined to become an adventuress and/or a detective, rather like the heroines of her favorite action-adventure serial, in the style of The Perils of Pauline or The Hazards of Helen. I love her.

What I Plan to Read Next

This is not so much a “what I am reading next” as I’ve already read it, but I just HAVE to brag: yesterday I found a copy of Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed at Half-Price Books and now it is MINE, ALL MINE.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was in elementary school my friend Micky and I bonded over our mutual loathing of Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, so it was with some dismay that I realized I was enjoying the sequel, A Solitary Blue. Who even am I as a person? Maybe it’s just that I’m an adult now; maybe Voigt is one of those children’s book authors adults tend to enjoy more than children.

A Solitary Blue gives us the backstory of Dicey’s boyfriend, Jeff Greene. Jeff’s mother Melody abandoned the family when Jeff was seven, leaving Jeff with his emotionally distant absentminded professor father and a boatload of abandonment issues. A few years later, Melody invites Jeff to come stay with her for the summer, and at first Jeff is bowled over by her warmth and charm and ability to make him feel like the center of the universe just by looking into his eyes. Slowly, however, as instances of Melody’s selfishness and unreliability mount, Jeff realizes that the ability to make someone feel seen and loved in the moment is not the same as actually seeing and loving them as a whole person, and that Melody does not and perhaps cannot love him that way.

The rest of the book is about Jeff slowly learning how to trust and reach out to other people again. It’s also about Jeff’s father realizing that he’s been emotionally absent from Jeff’s life, and learning how to be present. He has a dramatic wake-up call when he almost fails to notice that Jeff has come down with a virulent fever, but his reformation afterward is understated. He simply begins making an effort to be present, to pay attention to Jeff, and he does this so calmly and quietly and reliably that slowly both Jeff and the reader come to understand that this change is here to stay.

I also knocked off Wayne Vansant’s The Red Baron: A Graphic History of Richthofen’s Flying Circus and the Air War of WWI, which was meant to be research for… a book I am not writing right now after all… but time spent reading about World War I fighter pilots is always time well spent, I suppose.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic! I’ve had a long Mary Stewart hiatus, because I save Mary Stewart books for trips (that way I know I’ll have something enjoyable, fast-paced, and reasonably light to read on the journey) and of course there haven’t been many trips for the past year and a half… but over Labor Day weekend I went to Tennessee to visit a penpal, so Mary Stewart has returned! This book is set in Greece, and I always think that Stewart’s books in Greece (The Moon-Spinners, My Brother Michael) are particularly strong. She must have found the country inspiring.

For a few months I took a break on Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, because I couldn’t handle anymore about the poor civilians of Stalingrad (the evacuation, such as it was, was extremely late and half-hearted), but now I’m back in the saddle. The tide of battle has turned: the Soviet armies have encircled the Germans, who are clinging to the thought that Hitler will save them by Christmas, unaware that Hitler doesn’t even intend to try.

What I Plan to Read Next

On my trip I spent a happy hour trawling a used bookstore, and found Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. A Zilpha Keatley Snyder I haven’t read yet! So excited.

What I’ve Finished Reading

At long last I have finished Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count! I started reading this… over a year ago… it’s one of those books that is interesting while you’re reading it, but eminently easy not to pick back up once you’ve put it down.

It was particularly interesting for its depiction of the physical toll the war took on the French countryside: the farm fields that still turn out ordinance every time they’re plowed, the blockhouses that litter the countryside and are sometimes used as garages or garden sheds, the trenches still visible in the earth…

I also learned that the Germans made their trenches out of concrete. With drainage. I feel the British and the French could have emulated this technological advance with great profit, instead of making their troops wade through mucky dirt trenches for weeks on end till their feet started to rot.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom and his chums are being forced to do chores (fagged) by the fifth-formers, when only the sixth-formers are allowed to fag the lower forms, but the current sixth-formers have abdicated their duties and allowed the fifth form to run rampant… so Tom and his friend East have barricaded themselves in their study in revolt, and the biggest bullies of the fifth form are currently breaking the door down. Ah, schoolboy larks!

I’m also reading Elizabeth Brooks’ The Whispering House, which feels sort of like something Mary Stewart might write if she were still writing books today. You’ve got the gothic English country house with the mysterious family, the plucky first person girl narrator who is going to explore mysteries! fall in love! and maybe narrowly escape murder! (I’m not far enough in the book to be sure of that one, but I’m getting some vibes.)

It’s a little more “literary” than Stewart - alternating POVs, and the heroine is perhaps a little more mired in grief than a Stewart heroine ever gets about her dead family members. But still, as I said: there are vibes.

What I Plan to Read Next

Last week I vowed to make progress on my books in progress, and have I? Well, I guess finishing Back Over There counts, but for the most part, no. No I have not!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Matt Phelan’s Snow White: A Graphic Novel, a stylishly gothic retelling set in 1930s New York City. Did I love it? Of course I loved it. Everything about that description is made for me.

Snow White is the daughter of a financier; her stepmother is a Ziegfield girl; the seven dwarves are orphaned street urchins, and the glass coffin is the Macy’s department store window, which the street urchins sneak Snow into as, I think, a way of honoring this girl who has been so nice to them.

But of course she turns out not to be dead. As a nod to the original fairy tale, a police detective kisses her cheek, but as there’s been no magic so far, probably the stepmother just miscalculated the dosage when she injected the poison into an apple with a hypodermic needle. And then Snow uses the fortune she inherited from her father to adopt all seven of the urchins. Happy end!

And I dived back into the world of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax and A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, the latter of which includes the delightful and characteristic line “Her knowledge of army hierarchies had never been very clear and it had always seemed to her that generals tended to multiply like corporative vice-presidents or rabbits.”

Oh! And I read Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because I was puzzled that I found the recent movie adaptation (Mary and the Witch’s Flower) so underwhelming, because most of Mary Stewart’s work feels like it would be really easy to adapt to a movie. The plots of the book and movie are quite similar - the movie gives Mary’s new friend Peter a bigger role, because of course it does; movies always beef up the boy’s role - but the movie raises the stakes for a big flashy climax, and the book plot that is perfectly serviceable for lower stakes buckles under the strain.

What I’m Reading Now

Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, per

evelyn_b’s suggestion. This is an anti-racist novel from 1901 (Chesnutt was an African-American author and lawyer, in case you were wondering) and I am therefore waiting braced for everyone to suffer horribly. There was just a lovefest between Mammy Jane and her former masters, which ended with Mrs. Carteret gushing “We would share our last crust with you,” so I’m pretty much expecting the Carterets to throw poor Jane over and leave her to die in the poor house by the end of the book.

I’ve also begun Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I tried to read in high school but gave up because it felt so despairing. This time around, it no longer feels like a pit of despair - or maybe I just haven’t gotten to the despair part yet? Will share further thoughts once I’ve finished reading it.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Christmas season is almost upon us! As per

thisbluespirit’s instructions, it’s time to put Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch on hold.

On my trip I managed to watch a number of movies that I’ve been vaguely meaning to see for a while, so I thought I’d toss out a few quick reviews.

Moonstruck first came to my attention on a list of movies for Mother’s Day, which frankly shows the paucity of movies about mother and child relationships: the mother in Moonstruck is a great character, but the movie’s not really about motherhood at all. Rather, it’s about love! passion! Italian-American identity! and Nicholas Cage chewing the scenery like nobody’s business. Everything is purposefully over-the-top, and I really enjoyed it.

I came into The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with low expectations, because one of my friends told me she didn’t like it (although another told me she loved it, so go figure), which is probably the right way to approach it. It’s a solidly enjoyable period piece that doesn’t quite capture the charm or the voice of the book, although to be fair it probably would be difficult to capture the voice of an epistolary novel in a visual adaptation.

Also, I super got the impression from the movie that Dawsey was in love with Elizabeth, which I don’t remember being the case in the book. This is not a problem (in fact I think it adds a certain verisimilitude: why shouldn’t Dawsey have a romantic past?), but it did strike me as different.

I’ve been eyeing Mary and the Witch’s Flower ever since it came on Netflix streaming, intrigued by its Ghibli-esque aesthetic (the director actually got his start at Ghibli, where he directed Arrietty; Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the first film from his new studio). But in fact neither Paula or I really liked it: it’s scary, but without emotional depth, and the character development wasn’t as strong as it could have been.

This became especially surprising when I discovered that the story is based on Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because usually Mary Stewart’s books are good at that sort of thing. (It’s surprising that more of her books haven’t been made into movies: they’re so action-packed and picturesque that they ought to be easy to film.) Something must have been lost in the translation from book to screen.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I loved Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes. The heroine, Charlotte, has just arrived at boarding school in the 1960s… only to wake up the next morning at the same boarding school in 1918, in place of another girl. The two girls trade places back and forth, night by night, and it’s really interesting to see the way that they grapple with both the logistical difficulties of the situation (how do you keep track of your homework when you’re only there every other day?) and also the wider questions about identity that it raises. If everyone believes that you are someone - if they expect to see Claire and therefore see Claire even though in fact Claire has been replaced by Charlotte - do you become that person?

Not at all once, perhaps, but over time. Charlotte's memories of her own life start to seem strange and false to her because they're so contradicted by everything around her.

Definitely recommended if you’re fond of mid-twentieth century British children’s fantasy - perhaps just in general if you like children’s fantasy at all.

I felt less enthusiastic about Mary Stewart’s The Gabriel Hounds, mostly because ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I could have finished Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women, but I decided to put it on pause while I read the three books discussed in the final chapters of the book: Henry James’ The Bostonians, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, and Muriel Sparks’ The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Therefore, I’ve also begun George Gissing The Odd Women, which so far is about a group of sisters who have been left with only meager means of support following their father’s death. So far they’ve been following the genteel employments (governess, ladies’ companion - the youngest is a shopgirl) and living in genteel poverty, but a meeting with a strong-minded old friend may put them on the track of more lucrative if less genteel employment.

I’m really curious to see where this book goes: so far it’s quite different than your run-of-the-mill Victorian novel.

What I Plan to Read Next

THREE long-awaited holds have come in for me! Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Charles Finch’s The Vanishing Man, and the twelfth book in the manga series Now Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! Where should I even start?? The best problem to have.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

No one has published Elizabeth Wein’s latest book Firebird in the United States, but

littlerhymes kindly sent me a copy so I got to read it anyway, which is good because otherwise I might have expired from yearning because the book is about Soviet! women! fighter pilots! in World War II! and thus basically everything that I have ever wanted in a novel.

I liked the book, but ( spoilers )

I also read Penelope Farmer’s The Summer Birds, which I felt ambivalent toward until the end, ( spoilers again )

Then I got sick for a few days and needed something light to read, and Mary Stewart came to my rescue with Wildfire at Midnight. It’s not top-tier Mary Stewart, but even second-tier Mary Stewart is solidly satisfying, and just what I needed to cheer the dreary day.

What I’m Reading Now

I haven’t started anything new since I finished Wildfire at Midnight, because I’ve been indulging in schadenfreude over the internet meltdown about the last episode of Game of Thrones. People have been banging on for years about how this show is so “dark” and “morally complicated” and “realistic” and then it ended with the bad characters dead and most of the good characters alive and repenting of their sins like its a freaking Cecil B. DeMille epic. Did the showrunners trip and fall on a moral?

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m not sure! I’ve been looking longingly at my other Mary Stewart books, but there’s something to be said for parcelling them out over time as needed.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The combined blandishments of

rachelmanija and

skygiants made Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet impossible to resist, and it is indeed a delightful book. Two nuns (Sister John and Sister Hyacinthe) head to upstate New York to check out a property their impoverished nunnery has unexpectedly received; Sister Hyacinthe is concerned when they find a man bleeding from three bullet wounds in the closet and a suitcase full of money down the well, but Sister John remains blissfully calm: clearly God sent them the money so their order could make good use of it.

Sister John was chosen for the trip because of her all-around competence, thus proving that competence and common sense are not necessarily related.

They also team up with a bunch of hippies who are trying out their back-to-the-land experiment on the grounds of the long-abandoned house the sisters have inherited. Hippies and nuns: two great tastes that taste great together! And in a way it makes sense: both hippies and nuns are countercultural in the sense of rejecting mainstream American cultural values, even if their reasons for it are quite different.

I also finished E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I enjoyed, although I must confess that my favorite part was seeing which bits Edward Eager borrowed for his own books half a century later. There’s a chapter in here where the children wish the baby was grown up that Eager riffs off of twice: once when the girls wish themselves grown up and instantly turn into flappers, and another time when the children wish the baby grown and he becomes grown up in size - but still a baby in thought.

And also Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty, which was less engrossing than her Capital Dames even though in Ladies of Liberty the British burn down the White House, which one feels ought to be enough excitement for anyone.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Mary Stewart’s Madam, Will You Talk?. So far it seems quite a classic Mary Stewart, which is impressive given that it’s her first novel - you might expect it to be rougher than her later efforts.

What I Plan to Read Next

Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair. As I recall, I tried to read this before (the World’s Fair being an irrepressible draw) but gave up because it had lost all that unintentionally creeptastic Elsie Dinsmore flavor. It’s something like book twenty in the series and I suspect Martha Finley was just grinding them out at that point. But still! It may have useful World’s Fair nuggets.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: mary stewart

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