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Sep. 2nd, 2017 02:08 pmReading Barbara Michaels' Patriot's Dream was .... an interesting experience. One that frequently made me want to bang my head against the nearest window. But interesting!
Patriot's Dream is set in Colonial Williamsburg, whither Our Disillusioned 22-Year-Old Heroine Jan has retreated to live with her sweet but racist elderly aunt and uncle in their historic family home after a difficult year of being a teacher in an inner-city school followed by an equally difficult year of being a teacher in a private school.
CONSTANT READER: So Jan, why are you so disillusioned at your young age? Do you have a terrible past or a grave disappointment?
JAN: Teaching is the WORST, the children are RUDE and HORRIBLE and get in GANG FIGHTS and they don't appreciate the beauty of LITERATURE and nothing MATTERS in this world!
CONSTANT READER: So ... you really have no positive feelings towards your students at all, huh.
JAN: Nope! Every single one of them was an uncultured little shit.
As is generally the case in a Barbara Michaels novel, a set of suitors rapidly line up to compete for Jan's attention:
RICHARD, a sweet Colonial Williamsburg employee who agrees with Jan that the world is garbage and is going to spend the rest of his life making historical violins and pretending nothing else exists
ALAN, a rude and ugly lawyer whose favorite thing is picking fights with people, especially Jan, and who therefore is obviously going to be the final guy
A BORING DOCTOR, who is so boring I can't even remember his name
JONATHAN, a conflicted Quaker from from the Revolutionary War era that Jan starts stalking in her dreams from her first night in Colonial Williamsburg!
As revealed through Jan's dream-scenes, Jonathan is conflicted because he is a.) a pacifist and b.) vehemently abolitionist, and so even though he supports independence he ALSO starts helping slaves escape to the British ranks because the British army promises freedom which nobody in Virginia is about to do. OK; as an angle on the Revolutionary War this is kind of better than I was expecting from a historical romance written in 1976.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the historical B-plot involves Jonathan's best bud/Jan's great-great-etc.-grandfather Charles, who comes to realize that Slavery is Wrong only when he falls in tragic mutual totally uncoerced love with a beautiful white-passing house slave Leah in a plot that is literally straight out of a 19th-century melodrama.
And then, of course, our Jan, reacting to all this in the present:
JAN: So I've started reading up on this stuff, is it true about Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
RICHARD: Oh no! That's not in noble Jefferson's character!
ALAN: Oh yeah, it's definitely true.
CONSTANT READER: OK, Barbara Michaels, I'm kind of impressed that you went there in the Jefferson-worshipping bicentennial year of 1976 -
ALAN: Well, you know, probably what happened was he really loved her but they couldn't legally get married, so the only way they could be together was for him to keep her as a slave. It's very tragic.
JAN: Gosh, before I started having these historical dreams I never thought before how difficult it must have been for all those white men tragically in love with their slaves! Slavery really WAS the worst.
CONSTANT READER: I take it back!! I TAKE IT BACK.
( Anyway the moral of the story is if you understand how hard life was for tragic slave-owners in the past it will inspire you to fight to improve the present I guess )
Patriot's Dream is set in Colonial Williamsburg, whither Our Disillusioned 22-Year-Old Heroine Jan has retreated to live with her sweet but racist elderly aunt and uncle in their historic family home after a difficult year of being a teacher in an inner-city school followed by an equally difficult year of being a teacher in a private school.
CONSTANT READER: So Jan, why are you so disillusioned at your young age? Do you have a terrible past or a grave disappointment?
JAN: Teaching is the WORST, the children are RUDE and HORRIBLE and get in GANG FIGHTS and they don't appreciate the beauty of LITERATURE and nothing MATTERS in this world!
CONSTANT READER: So ... you really have no positive feelings towards your students at all, huh.
JAN: Nope! Every single one of them was an uncultured little shit.
As is generally the case in a Barbara Michaels novel, a set of suitors rapidly line up to compete for Jan's attention:
RICHARD, a sweet Colonial Williamsburg employee who agrees with Jan that the world is garbage and is going to spend the rest of his life making historical violins and pretending nothing else exists
ALAN, a rude and ugly lawyer whose favorite thing is picking fights with people, especially Jan, and who therefore is obviously going to be the final guy
A BORING DOCTOR, who is so boring I can't even remember his name
JONATHAN, a conflicted Quaker from from the Revolutionary War era that Jan starts stalking in her dreams from her first night in Colonial Williamsburg!
As revealed through Jan's dream-scenes, Jonathan is conflicted because he is a.) a pacifist and b.) vehemently abolitionist, and so even though he supports independence he ALSO starts helping slaves escape to the British ranks because the British army promises freedom which nobody in Virginia is about to do. OK; as an angle on the Revolutionary War this is kind of better than I was expecting from a historical romance written in 1976.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the historical B-plot involves Jonathan's best bud/Jan's great-great-etc.-grandfather Charles, who comes to realize that Slavery is Wrong only when he falls in tragic mutual totally uncoerced love with a beautiful white-passing house slave Leah in a plot that is literally straight out of a 19th-century melodrama.
And then, of course, our Jan, reacting to all this in the present:
JAN: So I've started reading up on this stuff, is it true about Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
RICHARD: Oh no! That's not in noble Jefferson's character!
ALAN: Oh yeah, it's definitely true.
CONSTANT READER: OK, Barbara Michaels, I'm kind of impressed that you went there in the Jefferson-worshipping bicentennial year of 1976 -
ALAN: Well, you know, probably what happened was he really loved her but they couldn't legally get married, so the only way they could be together was for him to keep her as a slave. It's very tragic.
JAN: Gosh, before I started having these historical dreams I never thought before how difficult it must have been for all those white men tragically in love with their slaves! Slavery really WAS the worst.
CONSTANT READER: I take it back!! I TAKE IT BACK.
( Anyway the moral of the story is if you understand how hard life was for tragic slave-owners in the past it will inspire you to fight to improve the present I guess )
