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Jun. 19th, 2012 08:34 amYesterday while I was wandering forlornly around at the bookstore because my favorite coffee place had mysteriously disappeared in the night, I found a copy of Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring in the bargain bin for a dollar. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, and the path before me had clearly been prepared; I bought it and zoomed through it on my lunch hour. AND IT WAS GREAT.
The Sherwood Ring is technically set in the 1950s and is technically about a neglected teenaged girl who gets sent back to the ancestral family home to live with her history-obsessed uncle and solve a mystery and have a romance. But before she goes, her dying father also mentions in an offhand sort of way that the ancestral family home has some ghosts --
PEGGY: Ghosts?!?
PEGGY'S DYING FATHER: Oh, don't worry, not the scary kind of ghost, they are all sexy Revolutionary War heroes! The worst they will probably do is some matchmaking, Helpful Hints On How Not to Get Your British Boyfriend Caught by Your Patriotic Relatives, that kind of thing.
PEGGY: . . .
-- and so actually most of the book, and by far the most interesting part, is the ghosts telling Peggy about everything that went down in the house during the Revolutionary War when Peggy's ancestor Dashing Young Officer Dick was sent to the area to chase around his nemesis, a brilliant British officer and leader of a secret outlaw band named PEACEABLE DRUMMOND SHERWOOD.
PEACEABLE DRUMMOND SHERWOOD, it should be mentioned, is very clearly the preincarnation of the Scarlet Pimpernel/Francis Crawford of Lymond/Lord Peter Wimsey. (Well, I guess he would be a post-incarnation of Francis Crawford.) He also ends up meeting Dashing Officer Dick's sister Barbara, and the resulting romance fulfills all my needs for dudes being starry-eyed over ladies who are extremely competent at being their enemies. ( Spoiler! ) Meanwhile, Dashing Officer Dick gets wind of the fact that his nemesis is in love with his sister, and . . .
DASHING OFFICER DICK: LOLOLOLOL I SHIP IT LOLOLOLOL
BARBARA: >:| >:| >:|
DASHING OFFICER DICK: I am sorry Barbara but this is the funniest thing to happen all war.
So you can see why I love this book. Elizabeth Marie Pope wrote one other fiction book in her life as far as I know, which I also love and need to reread one of these days soon; it's the Elizabethan Tam Lin where the hero and the heroine progress in their romance by talking seriously about drains. Elizabeth Marie Pope is GREAT.
The Sherwood Ring is technically set in the 1950s and is technically about a neglected teenaged girl who gets sent back to the ancestral family home to live with her history-obsessed uncle and solve a mystery and have a romance. But before she goes, her dying father also mentions in an offhand sort of way that the ancestral family home has some ghosts --
PEGGY: Ghosts?!?
PEGGY'S DYING FATHER: Oh, don't worry, not the scary kind of ghost, they are all sexy Revolutionary War heroes! The worst they will probably do is some matchmaking, Helpful Hints On How Not to Get Your British Boyfriend Caught by Your Patriotic Relatives, that kind of thing.
PEGGY: . . .
-- and so actually most of the book, and by far the most interesting part, is the ghosts telling Peggy about everything that went down in the house during the Revolutionary War when Peggy's ancestor Dashing Young Officer Dick was sent to the area to chase around his nemesis, a brilliant British officer and leader of a secret outlaw band named PEACEABLE DRUMMOND SHERWOOD.
PEACEABLE DRUMMOND SHERWOOD, it should be mentioned, is very clearly the preincarnation of the Scarlet Pimpernel/Francis Crawford of Lymond/Lord Peter Wimsey. (Well, I guess he would be a post-incarnation of Francis Crawford.) He also ends up meeting Dashing Officer Dick's sister Barbara, and the resulting romance fulfills all my needs for dudes being starry-eyed over ladies who are extremely competent at being their enemies. ( Spoiler! ) Meanwhile, Dashing Officer Dick gets wind of the fact that his nemesis is in love with his sister, and . . .
DASHING OFFICER DICK: LOLOLOLOL I SHIP IT LOLOLOLOL
BARBARA: >:| >:| >:|
DASHING OFFICER DICK: I am sorry Barbara but this is the funniest thing to happen all war.
So you can see why I love this book. Elizabeth Marie Pope wrote one other fiction book in her life as far as I know, which I also love and need to reread one of these days soon; it's the Elizabethan Tam Lin where the hero and the heroine progress in their romance by talking seriously about drains. Elizabeth Marie Pope is GREAT.
