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The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.
- The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. (Epigraph to The Tightrope Walker)
Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.
Amelia, a sheltered young woman with a traumatic past, is jolted into life and action when she first becomes the proprietor of an antique shop, then finds a note in an old hurdy-gurdy beginning, They’re going to kill me soon.
The mystery aspect is inextricable from the rest of the book, but it’s also a novel of character development and a book about how to live and thrive in a terrifying world. Amelia has anxiety, social and otherwise, and for good reasons; her evolution from spending most of her time locked in her room alone to engaging with fear and joy, both physical and existential, is beautifully depicted.
I had never read anything by Gilman before, though I had vaguely heard of her Mrs. Pollifax series, about an old woman spy. Amelia is a great character, the themes are moving, the plot is solid, and it has a good supporting cast. Even the wise Indian guru wasn’t that bad (low bar, I know), largely due to his philosophy turning out to not be generic wise guru wisdom but something distinctly odd. The love interest also turned out to much less awful than I initially expected.
Most importantly, the writing style is absolutely fantastic, witty and distinctive and an absolute pleasure to read. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me down. I look forward to reading more of Gilman’s books.
I read this one because someone here (whoever it was, thank you very much!) recommended it for integrating an imaginary book, in this case Amelia’s beloved children’s fantasy The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, into the story. This is very well-done, with just enough detail given to show why it was so meaningful to her and also to make it seem worth reading if you like that sort of thing, and also neatly integrated into the plot and themes. It turns out that after publishing this book, Gilman wrote and published The Maze in the Heart of the Castle! I’m not sure if I want to read it, or just keep on imagining it.
The Tightrope Walker
Only $4.99 on Kindle.
- The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. (Epigraph to The Tightrope Walker)
Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.
Amelia, a sheltered young woman with a traumatic past, is jolted into life and action when she first becomes the proprietor of an antique shop, then finds a note in an old hurdy-gurdy beginning, They’re going to kill me soon.
The mystery aspect is inextricable from the rest of the book, but it’s also a novel of character development and a book about how to live and thrive in a terrifying world. Amelia has anxiety, social and otherwise, and for good reasons; her evolution from spending most of her time locked in her room alone to engaging with fear and joy, both physical and existential, is beautifully depicted.
I had never read anything by Gilman before, though I had vaguely heard of her Mrs. Pollifax series, about an old woman spy. Amelia is a great character, the themes are moving, the plot is solid, and it has a good supporting cast. Even the wise Indian guru wasn’t that bad (low bar, I know), largely due to his philosophy turning out to not be generic wise guru wisdom but something distinctly odd. The love interest also turned out to much less awful than I initially expected.
Most importantly, the writing style is absolutely fantastic, witty and distinctive and an absolute pleasure to read. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me down. I look forward to reading more of Gilman’s books.
I read this one because someone here (whoever it was, thank you very much!) recommended it for integrating an imaginary book, in this case Amelia’s beloved children’s fantasy The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, into the story. This is very well-done, with just enough detail given to show why it was so meaningful to her and also to make it seem worth reading if you like that sort of thing, and also neatly integrated into the plot and themes. It turns out that after publishing this book, Gilman wrote and published The Maze in the Heart of the Castle! I’m not sure if I want to read it, or just keep on imagining it.
The Tightrope Walker
Only $4.99 on Kindle.
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I read it after The Tightrope Walker but can remember very little about it, which may mean that it's all right just to imagine it. I had no idea that she'd actually written it until I found it in the library, however, so it had this amazing shock of discovery.
The Tightrope Walker is my favorite novel by Dorothy Gilman. I read it young and return to it periodically and it always holds up.
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Even if this is your favorite, are there others you also like?
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Yes. I like a lot of the Mrs. Pollifax novels, although I do not always remember which adventures go with which adjective until I look them up. The Clairvoyant Countess is Gilman's take on a buddy cop novel—she's a psychic Russian exile! he's a cynical police lieutenant! they fight crime!—which means it contains a lot of slow change in people's lives as well as murders; I did not like the much later written sequel, but the original still worked for me as recently as last winter. Uncertain Voyage is a similar mix of self-discovery and suspense: the protagonist is told that sea travel is the best cure for depression in the wake of a long-coming divorce, but it turns out that international intrigue is even better. I haven't read A Nun in the Closet for years but remember it being a fun entry in the genre of "sheltered but not stupid women go up against organized crime, place your bets now." I've never read any of her YA novels and keep meaning to, just because they predate her adult work by decades in some cases and I'm curious what they're like. Occasionally she tips over into slightly too much New Age and I suspect that if I re-read all of Mrs. Pollifax critically, there would be at least one country where the representation was a mess, but I can't think of anything she's written that I would warn against. I don't remember a lot about the later Mrs. Pollifax, however, so I apologize in advance if one of them bites you.
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You're welcome! I realized as I was writing them out that Dorothy Gilman definitely has a genre and I'm not sure who else writes in it. The suspense plus self-discovery angle makes me think, actually, of the best Dick Francis.
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(Well, maybe after the brand new Murderbot. :D)
I do so love the above-referenced genre of "sheltered but not stupid women take on the world." ❤❤❤
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I shall have to read that!
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Did you write the one where Carstairs (or another of her CIA connections) ends up spending Christmas with her family and she has to juggle her two lives? I'm very fond of that one.
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That's definitely the one! It's one of my bookmarked Yuletide stories.
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LOVE this book!
I discovered that she’d written MAZE when I was an adult bookseller, and able to do title searches for my fave authors. It’s a perfectly good YA fantasy... but not as good as Amelia’s memories of it, if that makes sense.
I still have that shabby, much-re-read paperback copy, but also a used hardcover (I try to get hardcovers of any books I like to re-read).
I’ve also got most of the Pollifax series in hardcover; I gave my mom a copy of the second one (set in Turkey) before she and my dad took a trip there, she loved it, so I gave her the rest of the series over the course of several Christmases and birthdays. After she passed, I inherited ‘em all back... 📚😿
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The first. It was -- not good. And certainly not up to the description.
Try The Clairvoyant Countess instead.
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It is, however, extremely unabashedly allegorical. That may not be your thing.
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* Past-Myfanwy didn't read convincingly as a person describing herself. She spends a lot of time relating events like, "I meekly said 'blah blah blah'", and it just generally doesn't sound like the voice is coming from the narrator.
* For all the potential pathos of having a woman condemned to death writing letters to the person who's going to replace her, the only effect she seems to have is that she's Mrs. Worldbuilding Wiki.
* All of the purportedly highly-skilled and extremely-disciplined secret agents seem to be bickering incompetents.
* For a world whose major draw is "cool people with cool powers", none of the special powers come across as all that cool or interesting. There's this weird sheen of generic-ness that seems like it's laid over everything, and I can't quite articulate why. It seems a bit more like the author was going "Hey, this is a cool power, huh, right?" and not as much like "Look how this power can influence the plot in these cool ways" or even "look how I can develop an awesome scene with this power!"
* For all the frequent reminders that Myfanwy has an enemy of unknown power who apparently wants her dead, the book is strangely lacking in tension. In this aspect or anything else. Even when Myfanwy goes into danger for non-murder-plot-related reasons, she kinda swaggers in with a wisecrack and swaggers out the other side with a wisecrack.
I think there were probably other reasons. It was a deeply disappointing read.
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https://parahumans.wordpress.com
Terrible interface, I personally would swipe an unauthorized ebook.
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Warning for nightmare fuel, gross outs, anybody can die including kids and animals, and tons of trauma and general darkness, though not of the "everyone is horrible and good people are portrayed as morons" variety. It has GREAT character development, a lot of friendships that I really love, and great female characters (most of my favorites are women or girls). There is a character named Rachel who is one of my favorites in the entire ginormous cast. ;)
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The oddness of Myfanwy's affect I could handwave away because she'd grown up in such a cold and isolated way, but I could see not being able to get past the book's issues.
I would still like to read the book I'd thought it was going to be.
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I've never read The Tightrope Walker, but from your description, it sounds excellent.
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I used to get these out of the library when I was in middle school. My first one was the Mrs. Pollifax one where she goes to Africa (not as dire as you might imagine).
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I also like the Mrs. Pollifax books. I expected them to be cozy and fluffy, but they actually had a bit of grit to them (though not quite enough).