Mary Stewart thrillers and gothics cheap on Amazon!

[rachelmanija]

Old-school thriller/romance/gothic author Mary Stewart (possibly better-known for her Merlin trilogy beginning with The Crystal Cave) has a bunch of books on Kindle for cheap - possibly for a limited time. Nine Coaches Waiting and The Ivy Tree, Madam, Will You Talk?, Touch Not the Cat, and Thunder on the Right are $1.99 each, The Moon-Spinners and This Rough Magic, Wildfire at Midnight, Stormy Petrel, and Thornyhold are $2.99, and Rose Cottage, My Brother Michael, The Gabriel Hounds, and Airs Above the Ground are $3.99. Also a pair of short stories, The Wind Off the Small Isles and The Lost One, for $4.99.

I am poking through these and can't recall if I've read some or not. I know I haven't read them all. Which do you recommend or disrecommend?

Comments

[sovay]

Which do you recommend or disrecommend?

My favorite Stewarts are This Rough Magic, The Moon-Spinners, My Brother Michael, and Airs Above the Ground; I also like Madam, Will You Talk? but recognize some people bounce right off it. I can expand on any of the above if necessary. Touch Not the Cat was my childhood introduction to the trope of the telepathic soulbond. The Ivy Tree is a clever family impostor story. Wildfire at Midnight has a perfectly cromulent mystery plot but unfortunately a romance plot I wish to throw a divorce lawyer at. The Wind Off the Small Isles is a rare novella, never published in the U.S., I've never even seen a print copy, and I've never heard of The Lost One, so I'd snag those on general grounds of when-will-you-see-that-again.

[rachelmanija]

Thank you! Hmm. I think I have read The Moon-Spinners or My Brother Michael, but I'm not sure which.

[legionseagle]

I've got a copy of Wind off the Small Isles. It's a comparatively slight story set on Lanzarote, with one scene which will have claustrophobes freaking out, and a rather charming relationship based on mutual professional respect between an older mystery novelist (female) and a multi-awarded liftfic heavyweight (male) as a counterpoint to the usual younger couple.

I'd also put in a good word for Nine Coaches Waiting though that really is a Gothic and a half and there's some stuff about disability that's dated badly.

I really don't recommend Thunder on The Right.

[skygiants]

Of the ones I've read on here, The Ivy Tree is my favorite, but I haven't read ANY of sovay's list of favorites and clearly I should fix that.

[rachelmanija]

I await your hilarious reviews. ;)

[pameladean]

I'm haplessly fond of all the Greek ones, in this order, at least today: This Rough Magic (bonus Shakespeare references and theatrical trappings), My Brother Michael (bonus Greek theaters and plays), and The Moon-Spinners (bonus botanizing). I also love The Ivy Tree and Nine Coaches Waiting. The only really slight one is Thunder on the Right; perhaps not coincidentally, that's also the only one told in third rather than first person.

I have actually NOT READ nor heard of Stormy Petrel, so I need to fix that right away.

P.

Edited repeatedly to fix having messed up the italics.

[rachelmanija]

I am pretty sure I haven't either!

[sovay]

I have actually NOT READ nor heard of Stormy Petrel, so I need to fix that right away.

I should warn you that the only thing I can remember about The Stormy Petrel is that I didn't like it, but since I can't remember the reason, maybe it wasn't an especially good one.

[azara]

I think of Touch not the Cat as the last of the novels in her classic style. It was published in 1976, after a fair gap, and then there was an even longer gap before Thornyhold in 1988. There's something faded about Thornyhold and the other two late novels, Stormy Petrel and Rose Cottage, and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone except completists. There's very little spark or life in them, even though both Thornyhold and Rose Cottage are set in the post-war period where her contemporary books had such verve and style.

[mme_hardy]

You can definitely give Thornyhold a miss. The lovely lovely thing about Stewart is that they aren't just Gothics, they're mysteries, and the narrators are often untrustworthy. Nine Coaches Waiting is, I think, my favorite, but My Brother Michael and Airs Above The Ground are also great.

There's a mess with The Ivy Tree. It was edited for the U.S.; the UK edition had a subplot about IIRC suspicions of pregnancy that was cut. I tried ordering a UK edition a few years back and got the US edition instead. Anyway, since you don't know which you'll be getting, I'd avoid that one.

[mme_hardy]

We all seem to agree on My Brother Michael!

What struck me to stone in my adolescent reading was the pivotal recognition by the heroine (edit: of Nine Coaches Waiting) of what an unfair thing she'd done to her love by casting him as a Byronic villain. You don't see that sort of self-awareness much.

[legionseagle]

Oh, dear, because the pregnancy subplot issue is actually linked completely into the identity issues.

[sovay]

It was edited for the U.S.; the UK edition had a subplot about IIRC suspicions of pregnancy that was cut. I tried ordering a UK edition a few years back and got the US edition instead.

Seriously? I . . . must have read the UK edition. (I have old copies belonging to my mother.) I do not think of that subplot as inessential.

[queenbookwench]

I will have to disagree and say that I loved Thornyhold and think it a fine example of witchy/paranormal Stewart; though in all fairness my opinion might be colored by the fact that it was my first Stewart and I was 12 at the time.

[tibicina]

My favorites are Nine Coaches Waiting, This Rough Magic and Wildfire at Midnight. I also really like Airs Above the Ground, The Gabriel Hounds (though some of the attitudes towards race are... dated), My Brother Michael, and The Moon-Spinners.

And I really, really think they should make a movie of Nine Coaches Waiting (though it does have some issues.)

[twistedchick]

The Gabriel Hounds is dated, but I reread it the other day and ended up crying a bit about how so much of what she is describing has been destroyed by wars since it was written. It felt like entering a time machine.

[princessofgeeks]

I devoured all those books as a teenager. I loved Airs Above the Ground because it was about the Lippizzan horses.

Nine Coaches Waiting is kind of skeevy as to the romance but it's a good read too. It has a kid in a very prominent role; that might be a feature or a bug.

The Gabriel Hounds was set somewhere very Meditteranean.

I love her books for the settings as much as anything. I have read probably 80 percent of those titles and did enjoy them all but I imagine they are very dated today. They did have strong female heroines though, in terms of what that meant at the time.

[twistedchick]

The Gabriel Hounds takes place in and around Damascus, Syria, and is very consciously a tribute to Lady Harriet Stanhope.

I don't see the romance in Nine Coaches as "skeevy" -- unsure of your definition of that word -- but as a version of a very common trope in romance novels, and for that reason, acceptable. And there are many references in the text to Jane Eyre.

[oracne]

Lots of people dislike TOUCH NOT THE CAT, but it was my first of hers, and I really like it. I also love the time capsule-feel of THE MOONSPINNERS and THIS ROUGH MAGIC (note the locals are portrayed as you might expect, so far as I can remember).

THE IVY TREE is the first identity porn novel I remember reading ever.

[oracne]

Oh, yeah, THE GABRIEL HOUNDS has Cousins In Love as well as Romanticizing the Desert People.

[romsfuulynn]

Cousins In Love became Second Cousins in Love in the US edition. It actually isn't particularly genetically a problem unless there are problematic recessives. And the Cousins in Love being a problem is mostly a US twitch.

[twistedchick]

To me, all of the early Mary Stewarts are time-bound; I have to read them with the consciousness of the period in which they were written -- postwar, then mid and later 1950s, and early 1960s. The one of them above others that I would love to see made into a movie, even now, is Madam, Will You Talk?

[naomikritzer]

I found out probably last week that Mary Stewart's books were now all available on Kindle (this was not true the last time I checked) and got very excited, then didn't buy any because I couldn't remember any of the individual books well enough to know where I should start.

I read pretty nearly her complete works when I was 12-14. The only one I owned as "Touch Not the Cat" -- everything else, I checked out of the library. When I'd finished with Stewart, I tried a few other Gothic romance authors and discovered that Stewart was basically the top of the genre and everyone else was a pale imitation, except for Elizabeth Peters who was writing satirical versions that I adored. I moved onto her books and read all of THOSE for a while (and then she stopped writing anything other than More Amelia Peabody and I really liked the first few of those, but the later ones got increasingly repetitious.)

[mme_hardy]

Oh, I feel your pain. I wanted more Jacqueline Kirby so, so much.

[genarti]

Ooooh. Thank you for the tip! I grew up reading my mother's Mary Stewart books on vacations, and she's been a Mary Stewart fan for ages. I will definitely check this out, and send the link her way too.

I love Airs Above The Ground deeply, although it has some slight structural oddities. But the reason I mention it to you particularly is that, to a hilarious degree, it's basically as if Mary Stewart sat down to write a Dick Francis book. All the elements are there! And yet the end result is decidedly Stewart rather than Francis. I find it highly entertaining on that meta level, as well as fun in its own right.

I love Nine Coaches Waiting also, though the caveats others have mentioned about the dated disability stuff certainly apply. This Rough Magic is reasonably fun and full of Shakespeare references, although without the supernatural aspects the title always makes me want it to have. The Ivy Tree has interestingly complicated identity stuff going on -- the premise is that our heroine has been first mistaken for and then hired to impersonate an estranged heiress in a prodigal return to her dying grandfather's homestead. Identity complications spin out from there. There are horses, again. I seem to recall there's some threatened backstory sexual assault, but definitely not seen as romantic.

Several of these others I've read but not in years, and remember nothing about. Some of them I haven't read at all. Vacation reading ahoy!

[genarti]

Also, for those who have non-kindle ereaders, it looks like Kobo.com has the same deals!

[thomasyan]

Thanks, I tallied the comments above, and bought a whole bunch. I couldn't tell if The Ivy Tree was the UK edition or not, but at $2, was willing to take the gamble.

[romsfuulynn]

As a point of reference, I bought ALL of them instantly. Problematic stuff in the rereads so far. My all time favorite is "The Ivy Tree" but the explanation is a spoiler.

One other interesting point is that in some of them everybody SMOKES.

[rachelmanija]

Honestly I assume all books of that era will contain something problematic.

In The Gabriel Hounds MARIJUANA is smoked!

[ranalore]

The Gabriel Hounds! I'm sorry, I know others are held to be better, and I can even agree, from what I recall, that others were at least more coherent. Also, skeevy race issues. Yet I remain inordinately fond of it, not least because it was one of the ones where I found the romance age-appropriate (I own my May/December issues).

[rachelmanija]

I enjoyed that one too! I reviewed it here, even; I found it by clicking the Mary Stewart tag.

[zdenka]

I read Touch Not the Cat years ago and remember being not impressed with it. I thought the heroine was annoyingly slow not to have figured things out earlier.