Blue-Footed Musings

Wait for What Will Come by Barbara Michaels

Grade: B

In Wait for What Will Come, American Carla Tregellas finds out that she has inherited an ancient mansion in Cornwall. There’s not much money for keeping the place up but, being young and carefree, she decides to travel to Cornwall and live in the house until the money runs out. Once there, she meets several love interests. She also learns about the folk stories of the area, including that there’s a sea demon who abducts a woman from her family every 200 years on Midsummer’s Day. (Can you guess how many years it’s been since the last abduction?) Meanwhile, she hears and sees strange things around the house, and she nearly dies in what was obviously a staged accident. Can she find out what’s really going on before the demon comes to drag her down into the deep?

This book had its own special atmosphere, and it was a nice change. For me, an ancient, stony mansion on the seashore of Cornwall is a more interesting setting than, say, an old house in Virginia. I also liked the idea of the sea demon who abducts a young woman every 200 years.

But the book suffered from some of the common flaws of the romance novel. How can you believe that the heroine is a smart, modern woman who can take care of herself if she’s always behaving stupidly and irrationally and getting herself into desperate need of rescue? Also, though I understand why an author would want to try to keep the reader from guessing which guy would ultimately win the girl, making him the mean one is a terrible method for doing that. How can we be satisfied with the ending if we can’t even understand why the heroine would want such an oaf?

But there is a lot to be said for Michaels’ work. I always learn something from her books, which is part of my justification for reading them. From this book I learned a little bit about Cornish surnames. I no longer have the book handy, so I can’t quote from it, but Wikipedia gives a couple of versions of the rhyme that Michaels referenced, including this one:

By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Caer and Pen / You may know the most Cornishmen.

The Wikipedia article explains the meanings of the names. I think it’s interesting. I hadn’t even realized that there is such a thing as the Cornish language.

Next up in the Barbara Michaels binge is Patriot’s Dream.

Here I Stay by Barbara Michaels

Grade: C+

A thirty-something woman named Andrea is in a bad financial situation after her teenage brother Jim (whom she has raised) has a terrible, life-altering car crash. What a fortuitous time to inherit an old house in Maryland. She decides to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. The house is . . . (you guessed it!) haunted, and there will be dire consequences for her, her brother, and the friends they have made in their new hometown.

Here I Stay was almost good. The characters were generally likeable (though Andrea fretted far too much over her brother). There was a mysterious cat named Satan, who looked exactly like the former cat of the house, Beelzebub. I love mysterious cats! The problem was simply that so little happened during most of the book that I was yawning by the time something finally did happen. I also didn’t like the ending.

Favorite quote from the book:

I’m interested in practically everything. That’s why I’m always behind schedule. (spoken by Martin, a long-term boarder at the bed-and-breakfast)

Next up in my binge is Wait for What Will Come.

Witch by Barbara Michaels

Grade: B+

A middle-aged woman’s children have grown up and left the nest, so she goes looking for her dream house, and finds one in nowheresville Virginia. Sure enough, that house is haunted. But it’s not the dead that she needs to worry about. The living are far more dangerous.

Witch is not as dated as Ammie, Come Home. Some things about it still feel relevant. The main character finds herself at odds with some of her neighbors, who follow a rather nasty version of Christianity. She’s shocked by how conservative, bigoted, and sexist their beliefs are. She doesn’t realize how bad it is until she visits their church one Sunday. The hate-filled sermon is too much for her.

[She] had no desire to offend anyone, but she would not condone such trash by sitting still and listening to it. Quietly she rose and walked out of the church. . . . Oddly shaken, she sat in the car for a few minutes to recover her composure. She was disturbed, not so much by the encounter with a mind both violent and irrational, but by the realization that her safe, sane world was only one of many worlds. She had labored under the absurd but widespread delusion that the attitudes of her circle were those of the majority of humanity. For years she had lived in a world of superficial tolerance and good breeding. It had its faults; hypocrisy was one, certainly, and another was a kind of cynical indifference to the absolutes of both good and evil. But it was a stable world in its mediocrity and its studied pretenses. It was predictable. Surely she had been naive, though, to think of it as the normal world. In the strange universe she had glimpsed today, anything was possible.

I’ve had to come to a similar realization lately. There is a whole other world out there where people think differently than I do. It’s not a pleasant realization, and it comes with an equally unpleasant sense of powerlessnes. But it makes me feel a little better to read about someone experiencing the same thing. Though I gave the same grade to Witch as I’ve been giving to most of the books in this binge, it is my favorite so far.

I’m on a Barbara Michaels binge. As I joked with my husband, one could get the impression that Barbara Michaels’s stories are all the same. First, a woman moves into an old house, typically in the D.C. area. The house is haunted by one or more ghosts. There is probably a moldy, nasty basement with a blocked-off section, but if not, then an attic with a hidden nook. There is likely to be a mysterious cat. Don’t be surprised if a seance takes place. Somebody will probably find and use old clothing or linens, and somebody will do some research. There’s usually some sort of digging involved, and references to archaeology. Oh, and of course, people fall in love.

That formula holds true for many of her novels (though not all). It makes sense given that she was a cat person and had a degree in Egyptology. Her style was intentionally Gothic, and can you even have a Gothic romance without an old house? But though many of the books have shared elements, they each have their own tone and often seem more different than alike.

The first book of my binge was Shattered Silk, an old favorite of mine. I don’t need to review it here, having done so back in 2010. Shattered Silk is now considered to be the first book in the “Georgetown trilogy.” Having never read the first book of the trilogy, it made sense to move on to that one next.

Ammie, Come Home by Barbara Michaels, Grade: B+

In Ammie, Come Home, we first meet the characters Ruth (a 40-something widow who has recently inherited a house in the historic Georgetown neighborhood of D.C.), and Pat (a big, loud professor whose mother is a notable socialite), and Sara (Ruth’s niece, a student who has come to live with her aunt). There was also a love interest for Sara, though I’ve forgotten his name. Ruth’s house turns out to be haunted, and not in a good way. To give the book its due, parts of this story really creeped me out, but the atmosphere was claustrophobic and the action repetitive. The characters kept going back to the house over and over again, even though the evil presence kept showing up and harassing them. The characters and their dialogue are very much products of their time, and they seem dated now. I’m glad to have read this book, but I doubt I’ll ever pick it up again. One last item of potential interest: this book was made into a TV movie called The House That Would Not Die starring Barbara Stanwyck.

After Ammie, Come Home, I moved onto Witch, the review of which will be posted soon.