A Willful Woman…

The Theme: No Place Like Home

Why This One: I own it in the “Close to Home” imprint, which is actually not particularly on point.

Well, there I go again. I read this in March, hoping to have it reviewed before my big April trip. (Will post about this later, I hope. Hi Lori!) Of course it didn’t get done. I wasn’t sure what to say about it then and I’m even less sure two weeks later.

Most of the book takes place in the isolated cabin of Seth, a Vietnam vet and former mercenary with, unsurprisingly, some PTSD going on. Now he works as a Montana forest ranger, finding peace in “protecting life” instead of taking it, with occasional trips to town to blow off steam. That’s where he met Mariah, an Olympic track skier, and had a one night stand with her. He’s pretty startled when she shows up “lost” at his cabin a few months later, passing it off as a highly improbable coincidence.

It’s slowly revealed that Mariah is pregnant and has come seeking emotional support. Her father and coach are both pressuring her to have an abortion so she can compete in the Olympics, and she doesn’t want to. (Thankfully, the book is pretty neutral around abortion in general. Harlequins were a lot less conservative in the 90s than they were in the 2000s, when even suggesting a morning after pill made a character the spawn of Satan.) Seth can be a misogynistic tool, but he recognizes that it’s her decision and does his best to be supportive. Meanwhile, Mariah is helping him with some of his emotional issues. (I didn’t love this part, which emphasizes letting go of a terrible past without mention of atonement or redemption.)

The book goes in a weird suspense direction towards the end, which gets pretty unpleasant. I’m not sure why the author felt it was necessary, though it does demonstrate some of the issues a forest ranger has to deal with, and gives Seth a chance to be pretty awesome in helping Mariah recover.

I enjoy Eagle’s writing, which has a characteristic quirkiness to it, and looking back on the book for this review, I found myself liking it more than I remember doing at the time.

Content notes for book: miscarriage, a (fairly mild) anti-semitic remark, bullying of an intellectually disabled person (not approved by the text), a misogynistic remark, illness of a child, infidelity

The theme: Once More, With Feeling

Why this one: It’s not genre romance, but a very interesting read that really fit the theme.

This is one of those British wartime books that was written and published very close to the time it’s set, so it has a vivid atmosphere and immediacy to it. In a grand old house called Levet, the lord of the manor Bill and his wife Sara are on the verge of divorce. A late miscarriage (7 months, excruciating!) has left Sara an emotional wreck in a way no one really understands, and she feels completely incapable of sleeping with her husband again. Bill very much doesn’t want a divorce and suggests Sara take a stay in America, in the hopes that time apart will help her heal.

But just as Sara is about to leave, Bill has a bad accident putting up blackout curtains, her very old-fashioned mother-in-law Lydia arrives, and a mother and her three children are evacuated to their house from London. Sara’s chance to escape vanishes as the “Phony War” begins, and she and the other disparate members of the household are left to try to make the best of things.

Streatfeild always writes interestingly of people from different English classes and she has a wider reach here, writing for adults rather than children. Much of the book is about the inability of people to understand each other’s perspective.

“Sleeping nicely, isn’t he, dear little man, but you’ve got too much over him.” She removed the two under blankets which covered the sweating Herbert. “There, that’s better. One is heaps in this hot weather.”

Mrs. Vider knew nothing about air and wanted to know nothing about it, but she knew a great deal about warmth. All her life had been spent in a struggle for warmth.

Background, upbringing, and personality combine to make these people forced to live together strangers to each other, even Bill and Sara; and typically, the poor children are never really listened to or understood. One of the saddest parts of the book is the arc of Tommy, one of the evacuee children, who falls in love with gardening but of course will have to return to London someday.

I loved the variety of characters, especially one of Streatfeild’s very firm and opinionated Nannies, and related to their unsettled feelings during a time of upheaval and chaos that was also curiously passive. (Much like, say, being in lockdown.)

Sara, with what Lydia called to herself “her usual wrongheadedness,” was not doing that gardening pressed on to the right-minded by the wireless and the newspapers. She was spending her time on flowers. “And though,” thought Lydia, “nobody more dearly loves flowers than I do, this is clearly not the moment for them.” In order to lead Sara’s thoughts gently and tactfully to more practical ends, Lydia told her of Esmond, of all he had done in the last war, of his ceaseless effort to make Levet useful. But Sara, though she listened attentively, reacted unsatisfactorily, observing at the end of the tale of sacrifice:

“How loathsome for him. How he must have hated it.”

“One does not,” Lydia retorted, “think of oneself in war time.”

Sara blinked thoughtfully at the pudding on her plate.

“One shouldn’t perhaps,” she agreed, “but one does.”

“Bread and roses” could be considered one of the themes of the book, as well as “make the best of things” and “figure out what’s really important to you and go for it.” It’s such a different time — quite a mix of different times, really — but it still makes sense today.