Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

I just finished "Thornyhold" by Mary Stewart. If you paid any attention to my reading list last year, you'll have noticed that maybe a fourth of the books were Mary Stewart books. I can't quite put my finger on why I love this author but I am so eternally in debt to my roommate, Sarah, for introducing her to me.

Although the fact that the love interests usually say things like "my dear girl" before they take the protagonists into their arms for a kiss is a good start, I think that my real love for these books comes from their utter predictability.

I pick them up knowing that there will be a plucky young heroine. She will start out on a vacation/begin a new job/move to a new town, sometimes accompanied by a friend/female relative to provide support and comic relief. There she will meet a stranger who is rude to her. This man will turn out to be her employer/the next door neighbor/ex-boyfriend/husband-disguised-as-a-spy who is ruggedly handsome, with tanned and calloused hands but an educated sensibility. Together, they will embark on a dangerous mission, usually to solve or prevent a murder. Helping them on this mission will be an especially precocious youngster and a cat or dog (or both). Most times, a slatternly woman will get in the way of their obvious but unspoken and growing love. In the end, all misunderstandings will be swept away when the stranger saves the plucky young heroine from certain death, takes her into his arms, and gives her a kiss that stops time.

I remember when I was a teenage, I used to pray every night that I would be graced with a vision of my future husband. Just his face, I would ask, even just a glimpse. Then I could sit back and relax until I was introduced to that face and I would know - he's the one! Suspense has always killed me and to not know what my life would be in five years, ten years, forty years or who I would be sharing it with seemed unbearable.

But these books? I know exactly what will happen...the details change a bit, but the outcome never does. Everything is happily ever after, riding off into the sunset, satisfactorily resolved.

So, until my fervent prayers of youth are answered and my dreams send me a vision of my future, I will continue to turn to Mary Stewart for predictable comfort. On that note, 'Madam, Will You Talk?" is calling so I'm off to find out what will happen to Charity Selbourne, an extravagantly lovely war widow, and her amusing, irreverent artist friend, Louise Cray, when they arrive in the South of France expecting a conventional holiday only to encounter a young man of thirteen who is having trouble with his dog and holds a terrible maturity behind his grave eyes.*



*FYI - that last bit is an almost verbatim quote from the flyleaf of the book and I swear I didn't read it before writing the above commentary on why I love Mary Stewart.