Mal ,'War Stories'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
She also wrote decent mysteries--though more typical of the genre of "woman in peril solves mystery and finds love"--under the name Barbara Michaels. But I've always like her versions better than others.
A friend recently gave me a stack of the supernatural-tinged ones, and I've been happily reading through them. They're not quite gothic romance, but they're close enough, and well-written.
My favorite of Barbara Michaels' is "Witch."
I just read that last night! It was a lot of fun.
Ooh, I don't think I've read that one. My favorite is Shattered Silk.
I started Ammie Come Home at bedtime last night, and I know that Shattered Silk is the sequel to it. I've already read Stitch in Time , which is apparently the third book in that ... not quite trilogy, but narrative stream.
Hm, I know I read Ammie Come Home, but did I read Stitch in Time? I think so, but I'll have to look at a description...
I first discovered the writer as Barbara Michaels, and devoured the books as fast as I could find them. Which is the one where she buys a house in rural Virginia and discovers the neighbor boy has been torturing animals?
Something I loved about her books is the domestic detail, like the dinner party in Ammie Come Home, "I squashed my roll"--I still remember her description of forsythia in the garden as "like little suns"--or remodeling the Virginia house and the debate between spoiling the symmetry of the front facade vs. needing a screened porch for summer. It's those details that ground the character and the story in reality and take it a notch above many gothics, at least for me. Mary Stewart had the same talent in her books, of setting the reader in realistic details before everything began to slide sideways.
Did Barbara Michaels write "A Child Is Crying" too? I loved that one.
The one with the house is "Witch." And I adore Mary Stewart as well. Jane Aiken Hodge is another on in their rank for me. I re-read a Hodge after several years and suddenly understood some of the subplots and dialogue a lot better than I did when I was a naive teenager.
The Crying Child? Yes. I'd been reading gothic and romantic suspense for a while and was feeling pretty jaded, but The Crying Child had me turning on all the lights and pulling up the couch blanket to cover all of me, and clutching my bear closer so I could read further.