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Mar. 12th, 2025 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAfter discovering that Frances Mary Hendry of my beloved Quest for a Maid wrote several other books that I had never heard of, I have finally managed to get my hands on Quest for a Kelpie, her very first novel, and enjoyed it enormously.
Like Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is a detailed, vivid portrait of the daily life of an adolescent girl doing her domestic tasks in a bourgeois household while living through Scottish historical turmoil, in which there are no good answers about who to support on a high level and all the normal people on the ground are just going through it as best they can.
Unlike Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is set during the Jacobite uprising, and I would eat my HAT if Hendry had not read Flight of the Heron, because in the first chapter our plucky heroine Jeannie Main rescues a [Romani] [this is not the word used but it's written in 1986. you know] girl from a false accusation and receives a prophecy from her mother of subsequently meeting five times! in life-endangering peril! I did wonder hopefully if we might go A Direction with this but it turns out the prophecy does not actually apply to the other teenager much at all, the Significant Fate is with her mother, and they do rescue each other from life-endangering peril various times and it's great but really not the same vibes at FotH. You know. Amuwau, I Received A Prophecy From A [Romani] Seer is also absolutely something that could go terribly wrong but aside from the Prophecy the book's attitude towards the whole family struck me as surprisingly grounded and matter-of-fact; it's another culture, one that has different norms and that sometimes comes into conflict with Jeannie's, but Jeannie is also much less weird about them than she is about, say, Catholics, Who Are Of The Devil (until she meets some and learns to think differently about that too.) Life is hard on all sides, and everyone in their own ways is just getting by.
'but what about Bonnie Prince Charlie?' you may ask, and also, 'what about the Kelpie?' Great questions!
To the first: the Jacobite Uprising is happening and we are very firmly focused on ordinary townspeople caught in the middle of it who mostly have no big opinions about the politics of it all and are just trying to Get Through These Bad Times, Preferably Without Any Family Members Dying. I love and support them for this. Jeannie occasionally has heroics and does impact the course of the war but the heroics are all things like bravely speaking up to say the right thing at the right time, or deciding whether to pass on an important piece of news that she's overheard, or going on a Totally Normal Walk To Sell Fish With Definitely Her Cousin Don't Worry About It. She's not picking up a sword. She is knitting every time she goes anywhere, because it's the eighteenth century and we all gotta be making textiles all the time if we're going to have enough for everyone to have clothes, and Frances Mary Hendry really wants to constantly immerse you in the details of daily life as a normal person and I love and support her for this also.
To the second: the prophecy about five significant meetings also tells her that she's going to ride a kelpie! So look forward to that!
It's definitely not quite as rich a book as Quest for a Maid -- you can tell that it's a first novel and she hasn't fully hit her stride yet -- but I had a great time with it and it in no way diminished my desire to seek out everything else Hendry wrote. It also has a fantastically irrelevant frame story in which Jeannie Main spends three pages at the front of the book explaining that she's writing this text about her heroic childhood adventures because she's annoyed about Regency culture and hates all her grandchildren. Perfect, no notes.
Like Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is a detailed, vivid portrait of the daily life of an adolescent girl doing her domestic tasks in a bourgeois household while living through Scottish historical turmoil, in which there are no good answers about who to support on a high level and all the normal people on the ground are just going through it as best they can.
Unlike Quest for a Maid, Quest for a Kelpie is set during the Jacobite uprising, and I would eat my HAT if Hendry had not read Flight of the Heron, because in the first chapter our plucky heroine Jeannie Main rescues a [Romani] [this is not the word used but it's written in 1986. you know] girl from a false accusation and receives a prophecy from her mother of subsequently meeting five times! in life-endangering peril! I did wonder hopefully if we might go A Direction with this but it turns out the prophecy does not actually apply to the other teenager much at all, the Significant Fate is with her mother, and they do rescue each other from life-endangering peril various times and it's great but really not the same vibes at FotH. You know. Amuwau, I Received A Prophecy From A [Romani] Seer is also absolutely something that could go terribly wrong but aside from the Prophecy the book's attitude towards the whole family struck me as surprisingly grounded and matter-of-fact; it's another culture, one that has different norms and that sometimes comes into conflict with Jeannie's, but Jeannie is also much less weird about them than she is about, say, Catholics, Who Are Of The Devil (until she meets some and learns to think differently about that too.) Life is hard on all sides, and everyone in their own ways is just getting by.
'but what about Bonnie Prince Charlie?' you may ask, and also, 'what about the Kelpie?' Great questions!
To the first: the Jacobite Uprising is happening and we are very firmly focused on ordinary townspeople caught in the middle of it who mostly have no big opinions about the politics of it all and are just trying to Get Through These Bad Times, Preferably Without Any Family Members Dying. I love and support them for this. Jeannie occasionally has heroics and does impact the course of the war but the heroics are all things like bravely speaking up to say the right thing at the right time, or deciding whether to pass on an important piece of news that she's overheard, or going on a Totally Normal Walk To Sell Fish With Definitely Her Cousin Don't Worry About It. She's not picking up a sword. She is knitting every time she goes anywhere, because it's the eighteenth century and we all gotta be making textiles all the time if we're going to have enough for everyone to have clothes, and Frances Mary Hendry really wants to constantly immerse you in the details of daily life as a normal person and I love and support her for this also.
To the second: the prophecy about five significant meetings also tells her that she's going to ride a kelpie! So look forward to that!
It's definitely not quite as rich a book as Quest for a Maid -- you can tell that it's a first novel and she hasn't fully hit her stride yet -- but I had a great time with it and it in no way diminished my desire to seek out everything else Hendry wrote. It also has a fantastically irrelevant frame story in which Jeannie Main spends three pages at the front of the book explaining that she's writing this text about her heroic childhood adventures because she's annoyed about Regency culture and hates all her grandchildren. Perfect, no notes.
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Date: 2025-03-13 08:09 pm (UTC)Jeannie Main vs Sir Walter Scott: the battle we need.
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Date: 2025-03-16 10:04 am (UTC)If I read any other of Hendry's books besides Quest for a Maid, I don't remember them by name, but I will try to track this one down! I am glad it does deliver on the kelpie.
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Date: 2025-03-23 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-23 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-18 03:06 pm (UTC). It also has a fantastically irrelevant frame story in which Jeannie Main spends three pages at the front of the book explaining that she's writing this text about her heroic childhood adventures because she's annoyed about Regency culture and hates all her grandchildren. Perfect, no notes.
Ahahahaha!
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Date: 2025-03-23 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-19 06:12 pm (UTC)Honestly, always here for this sort of take.
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Date: 2025-03-23 10:40 pm (UTC)