Blue-Footed Musings

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.

I started keeping track of my reading when I began my blog in 2007. Between then and the end of 2017, I read 498 books. I had hoped to read two more before the new year, just to even out the number, but that didn’t happen. However, my delay in finishing this post has helped me out. I read two books this year already, so now I can say that I’ve read 500 books since starting my blog. And though my numbers were low during some years, the average works out to 45 per year, which is not far off my goal of 52 per year.

As for 2017, I started off the year poorly by forcing myself through a history/travel book that I wasn’t quite in the mood for. I just wanted it done. I got it done, but it took a long time, and it burned me out. It wasn’t the kind of reading that I needed at a time when everything was stressing me out. I did eventually get back in the mood to read, though, and I ultimately finished 27 books (well, 26 books. I read one twice.).

Favorite Book Read in 2017: The Last Legends of Earth by A.A. Attanasio. This is one of my favorite books ever. I read it twice this year. It has its flaws, to be sure, but I love it for its inventiveness and its eerie atmosphere. Also, the author managed to squeeze thousands of years of story line into less than 500 pages, which is amazing. I was hoping to absorb some of the book’s power and bring it to my novel. I think the absorbing part worked. All I have to do now is write the novel.

Worst Book Read in 2017: The Bobbsey Twins on a Ranch by Laura Lee Hope, hands-down. It was outdated in all the worst ways, and it’s the most racist book I’ve ever read.

Biggest Reading Surprise in 2017: Several of the books were surprisingly good, including…

• Hungry Monkey by Matthew Amster-Burton, A
• Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs, A-
• The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, A-
• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, A

Biggest Reading Accomplishment of 2017: About a quarter of the books I read in 2017 were nonfiction. This is the highest percentage of non-fiction I’ve ever read in any given year.

Reading Goals for 2018: None. I have no reading goals. I’m giving myself a break. No rules, no expectation. I’m going to scratch any reading itch I get. To start off the year, I’ve ordered a bunch of Barbara Michaels books from the library. I can’t wait to get started on them.

Wishing everyone a wonderful year of reading in 2018,

Chick