Rereading Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
Jan. 17th, 2023 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutMy bestie from high school years (and earlier and of course we are still good friends now! Even tho we are middle aged and her kids are all grown and mine are teenagers) responded on FB asking how on earth she’d never heard about Mary Stewart from me or anyone else. I’d pointed her at Sayers and Heyer, so it was weird that this one never was communicated. But I read Stewart when I was a lot younger, and I stopped rereading Stewart far sooner than Sayers. I didn’t even _find out_ about Heyer until college or later.
I’d looked around for Stewart novels on kindle some years ago, but didn’t find them and didn’t go back to check again until my friend H. said she was rereading them. And I was like WHAT!!!! So I bought a bunch and they sit for a bit until recently, and I started rereading _This Rough Magic_.
There are a bunch of bits in this book that I _so_ vividly remember, probably most of all when Lucy asks what Miranda was saying, and Max tells her it’s the bit from Much Ado About Nothing where Beatrice says the delightfully feral I would eat his heart in the marketplace. And then Adoni responded by saying, Here I have cooked it for you. Soooooooo delicious. Sooooo delightful. Sooooooo bloodthirsty with a thin, scratched and broken veneer of civilization.
The book is laden with Shakespearean quotations and, in retrospect, is probably a big chunk of why I was reading Shakespeare in high school and early college. I wasn’t there for Romeo and Juliet, but Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, that I was all over, and Julius Caesar too, for that matter.
Max Gale is a ridiculous name, and the tail end of the book requires our heroine to display Iron Man levels of stamina, but it is a ton of fun and I loved it all. I’m looking forward to the next one I reread, which will probably be _Nine Coaches Waiting_.
There are some unfortunate stereotypes of the Corfiotes, but beyond that, the book holds up reasonably well.
I’d looked around for Stewart novels on kindle some years ago, but didn’t find them and didn’t go back to check again until my friend H. said she was rereading them. And I was like WHAT!!!! So I bought a bunch and they sit for a bit until recently, and I started rereading _This Rough Magic_.
There are a bunch of bits in this book that I _so_ vividly remember, probably most of all when Lucy asks what Miranda was saying, and Max tells her it’s the bit from Much Ado About Nothing where Beatrice says the delightfully feral I would eat his heart in the marketplace. And then Adoni responded by saying, Here I have cooked it for you. Soooooooo delicious. Sooooo delightful. Sooooooo bloodthirsty with a thin, scratched and broken veneer of civilization.
The book is laden with Shakespearean quotations and, in retrospect, is probably a big chunk of why I was reading Shakespeare in high school and early college. I wasn’t there for Romeo and Juliet, but Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, that I was all over, and Julius Caesar too, for that matter.
Max Gale is a ridiculous name, and the tail end of the book requires our heroine to display Iron Man levels of stamina, but it is a ton of fun and I loved it all. I’m looking forward to the next one I reread, which will probably be _Nine Coaches Waiting_.
There are some unfortunate stereotypes of the Corfiotes, but beyond that, the book holds up reasonably well.