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May. 15th, 2018 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsTouch Not the Cat is one of the few Mary Stewart Gothics I read as a teen and it left a fairly strong but conflicted impression on me, so when genarti reread it recently I decided the time had come to re-experience it.
The premise: Our Heroine Bryony has a PSYCHIC ROMANTIC LINK WITH .... some cousin! A cousin who refuses to reveal his identity! (But he knows who she is, because she's the only girl cousin. The injustice of this completely poisoned me against the Hypothetical Cousin Love Interest as a teenager and still fills me with irritation today; I would be happier with the book as a whole if Bryony started out as irritated about this as I was.)
Unfortunately, all of Bryony's cousins are definitely Problematic Cousins, so while in theory she's excited to discover the identity of her true love and fall into his arms for a happily-ever-after, in practice she keeps meeting up with her cousins and going "....hm. Um. :/"
The Situation Gets Worse when Bryony returns to her Ancestral Home and discovers that it's quite possible one, both, or all cousins were involved in the tragic and untimely death of her beloved father! This immediately plunges Bryony into a round of What Do We Owe TO Our Psychic Soulmates, What Do We Owe To Ourselves, which admittedly is a game I always enjoy.
Fortunately, it turns out that in fact NO terrible cousin is Bryony's secret soulmate, she's actually spend the past twenty years in a deep mental love affair with the gardener! Who is still some kind of long-long-lost-illegitimate cousin, but it's all MUCH less incesty, and also, he's significantly less of a dick. Bryony breathes a sigh of relief, along with all the rest of us.
(Class issues do provide at least a fig leaf of excuse for the fact that he's kept his identity secret while knowing hers perfectly well. It still irritates me, but .... once they get together they are legitimately cute. Zero to old married couple in the space of three pages!)
Overall a reasonably strong Stewart, and now I gotta reread The Ivy Tree, which is the other one that I half-remember from fifteen years ago.
genarti reread it recently I decided the time had come to re-experience it. The premise: Our Heroine Bryony has a PSYCHIC ROMANTIC LINK WITH .... some cousin! A cousin who refuses to reveal his identity! (But he knows who she is, because she's the only girl cousin. The injustice of this completely poisoned me against the Hypothetical Cousin Love Interest as a teenager and still fills me with irritation today; I would be happier with the book as a whole if Bryony started out as irritated about this as I was.)
Unfortunately, all of Bryony's cousins are definitely Problematic Cousins, so while in theory she's excited to discover the identity of her true love and fall into his arms for a happily-ever-after, in practice she keeps meeting up with her cousins and going "....hm. Um. :/"
The Situation Gets Worse when Bryony returns to her Ancestral Home and discovers that it's quite possible one, both, or all cousins were involved in the tragic and untimely death of her beloved father! This immediately plunges Bryony into a round of What Do We Owe TO Our Psychic Soulmates, What Do We Owe To Ourselves, which admittedly is a game I always enjoy.
Fortunately, it turns out that in fact NO terrible cousin is Bryony's secret soulmate, she's actually spend the past twenty years in a deep mental love affair with the gardener! Who is still some kind of long-long-lost-illegitimate cousin, but it's all MUCH less incesty, and also, he's significantly less of a dick. Bryony breathes a sigh of relief, along with all the rest of us.
(Class issues do provide at least a fig leaf of excuse for the fact that he's kept his identity secret while knowing hers perfectly well. It still irritates me, but .... once they get together they are legitimately cute. Zero to old married couple in the space of three pages!)
Overall a reasonably strong Stewart, and now I gotta reread The Ivy Tree, which is the other one that I half-remember from fifteen years ago.
