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Jul. 14th, 2018 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThere are a couple things that are great about Barbara Michaels' Ammie, Come Home. The plot involves a nice sixties college student Sara, who gets possessed by a ghost that haunts her fancy old Georgetown house. Sara is in peril! Her love interest Bruce desperately tries to help her!
However, the actual protagonist is Sara's refined Aunt Ruth, who spends a solid half the book paying no attention to Bruce's Deep Feelings About Sara because she is too busy judging him for his wildly pretentious hipster outfits and terrible moustache. The narrative wants you to know that Bruce loves Sara desperately! Ruth just wants you to know that his fancy vests are honestly absurd.
If the whole book had been Ruth, Bruce and Sara working together to sort out their haunted house difficulties while Ruth judges Bruce and Bruce tells Sara how wonderful she is, this would rank among top-tier Barbara Michaelses. Unfortunately, there is also Ruth's love interest, Pat. Pat is a big brash mansplainy college professor who drives Sara home one day and decides Ruth is just the woman for him; Ruth, gratefully widowed after a nasty, brutish and short first marriage, is somewhat ambivalent. Events will bear her out on this, although, unfortunately, she becomes less ambivalent as they do.
It's possibly not entirely fair to blame Pat for his extremely poor and occasionally rapey behavior while under the influence of the household's supernatural nasties, but I'm sorry, I do. It's also definitely not fair to blame Pat for the fact that Sara gets to do almost nothing in the case of her own haunting and possession besides hang around in a miniskirt looking cute and stressed in a sixties sort of way, but if he weren't in the story maybe that would leave some narrative room for Sara to do something ... anything .....?
(Ruth gets to do stuff! Ruth gets to wield a frying pan with deadly intent, and more power to her.)
Anyway. Not, as it turns out, a top-tier Michaels, but I would love to see more narrative team-ups between love interests and judgy moms/disapproving aunts/dubious elder relatives to Save The Person They Both Love; a highly underused narrative gold mine, honestly.
However, the actual protagonist is Sara's refined Aunt Ruth, who spends a solid half the book paying no attention to Bruce's Deep Feelings About Sara because she is too busy judging him for his wildly pretentious hipster outfits and terrible moustache. The narrative wants you to know that Bruce loves Sara desperately! Ruth just wants you to know that his fancy vests are honestly absurd.
If the whole book had been Ruth, Bruce and Sara working together to sort out their haunted house difficulties while Ruth judges Bruce and Bruce tells Sara how wonderful she is, this would rank among top-tier Barbara Michaelses. Unfortunately, there is also Ruth's love interest, Pat. Pat is a big brash mansplainy college professor who drives Sara home one day and decides Ruth is just the woman for him; Ruth, gratefully widowed after a nasty, brutish and short first marriage, is somewhat ambivalent. Events will bear her out on this, although, unfortunately, she becomes less ambivalent as they do.
It's possibly not entirely fair to blame Pat for his extremely poor and occasionally rapey behavior while under the influence of the household's supernatural nasties, but I'm sorry, I do. It's also definitely not fair to blame Pat for the fact that Sara gets to do almost nothing in the case of her own haunting and possession besides hang around in a miniskirt looking cute and stressed in a sixties sort of way, but if he weren't in the story maybe that would leave some narrative room for Sara to do something ... anything .....?
(Ruth gets to do stuff! Ruth gets to wield a frying pan with deadly intent, and more power to her.)
Anyway. Not, as it turns out, a top-tier Michaels, but I would love to see more narrative team-ups between love interests and judgy moms/disapproving aunts/dubious elder relatives to Save The Person They Both Love; a highly underused narrative gold mine, honestly.
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Date: 2018-07-15 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-15 05:40 am (UTC)It really is.
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Date: 2018-07-15 06:42 am (UTC)Excellent!
Does Pat actually serve a narrative purpose, or is he just there to be a vector for the nasty supernatural stuff?
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Date: 2018-07-15 02:21 pm (UTC)This sounds delightful. It should be its own genre!
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Date: 2018-07-15 03:15 pm (UTC)Years later I reread ACH in full form from the library. I was surprised that I hadn't noticed the rapey part of Sam and Ruth. Then I realized that it had probably been "condensed" out of the RD version. First impressions last the longest, so I tend to be more favorable toward Pat than he deserved. He didn't DO much in the story other than being influenced by a malevolent spirit, but he didn't behave badly either.
In any case, ACH introduced me to Barbara Michaels and for that I am grateful.