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Many Mary Stewart books wax rhapsodic about scenic locales, but The Stormy Petrel, more than any of the others, reads like Mary Stewart went somewhere lovely on vacation and decided she wanted to tell us all about it and only somewhat later remembered that her usual genre often required at least a veneer of plot.

The premise: Rose Fenemore is an academic and writer who wants to find somewhere quiet to work on her poetry and science fiction novels. She arranges to meet her brother for a long vacation in a cottage on an extremely beautiful, moderately isolated island, and then spends the next fifty pages or so describing how successful her writing retreat was while her brother is delayed by various minor catastrophes, and yes, all right, Mary Stewart, now I also would like to go for a writing retreat on an extremely beautiful, moderately isolated island, you did your job, well done.

Oh, but right! The plot! One night two strangers turn up independently at her cottage doorstep with stories about how they're related to the cottage and the big house on the island, either of whom might hypothetically be sinister, and involve the protagonist in drama ...

And then one of them turns out to be perfectly nice in the next scene, and the other one turns out to be a petty criminal, exactly like all of the islanders said he was, but not really in a way that's at all threatening to our heroine, he was just there to steal the silver from the big house. I kept waiting for there to turn out to be some twist about all of this, but there is absolutely none, by which I must conclude that this book is not a Gothic, a.) because there's no peril and b.) because the stranger who looks nice is indeed nice and the stranger who looks shady is indeed shady!

Anyway they sort that all out, and then Rose's brother turns up with a friend who's a developer and wants to turn the island into a golf course, so there's a last-twenty-five-pages surprise plot about scaring off the developer, who also turns out to be perfectly nice and rescues a stormy petrel. No golf course! The island is safe for the right kind of vacation! The charms of which Mary Stewart would be happy to explain to you at greater length, you didn't really need to do anything this summer besides visit a scenic Scottish beach, did you?

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I read this one last year while I was visiting Mull! It is not quite as isolated as the book implies, and I think hasn't been for some time---the Real Year of Stewart's books is always somewhere between 1949 and 1965. We had good mobile coverage everywhere. It is indeed a beautiful place.

It really does sound lovely! Does one still have to take a ferry to get there that only comes twice a week?

No, there are multiple ferries and service in summer is frequent! They serve different locations and run several times a day. And there is no Oban-Tobermory (I do not know whether there ever was). The Oban ferry is the principal one; it goes to Craignure and one must drive or bus to Tobermory from there. We didn't use the other ferries, so I cannot rate them, but we enjoyed Oban-Craignure ferry a lot more than the Craignure-Tobermory drive, which was one of Those Roads.

The island in the story is a blend of Mull (the loch) and Iona (no vehicles).