I adore everything Mary Stewart has written and I adore Mary Stewart herself. She feels like someone I would have wanted to be friends with. I'm especially fond of her kindness to animals and her bouts of fury (via characters in her books) against people who harm or try to harm an animal. I feel exactly the same way when I come across animal cruelty. I've never understood how people could so easily torment, torture or kill something so innocent - especially family pets, like dogs, who love us absolutely, care not what we look like and always forgive us. Harming them is like harming a child - how could someone live with that?
This is my current favourite Stewart book. I haven't read them all, but I am quite determined to do so. There's no bad in them. If there is an injustice, Stewart brings justice. Happy endings and fairness for people and animals - it's lovely. If only it were possible to have this in life. There are faint echoes of Shakespeare's The Tempest in the book's background - the isle, the references to Caliban, Miranda and Prospero, and the quotes at the beginning of each chapter interspersed with conversational quotes by one of the characters.
The story itself is a mystery. It begins with a dolphin being shot at and a boy going missing at sea. Before this all the characters lived in a relatively solitary peaceful idyll on their sun-drenched Corfu island - the possible location of The Tempest. But the mysteries and loss drag them together and let them really see each other, helping them solve the mysteries, heal broken hearts and understand vengeance.
"If I were a man I would eat his heart out!" Miranda p386
It's a brilliant line spoken by a girl anguished with her need for justice - and she gets it. Poor Lucy, who only came to the island to escape the bleak London winter and visit her pregnant sister, finds herself deep in danger as she stumbles onto the island's mysteries and attempts to solve them so Miranda and her family have their justice. She's like Nemesis when she stands in front of a dolphin that someone hidden on the cliff is firing at and she storms marvelously through the rest of the book, looking for the truth, until the literally explosive ending.It was a brilliant book. The characters were fascinating and endearing. My favourite was the aging actor, crippled with grief, Julian Gale. He was magnificent in every way - almost Tempest-uously so!.
"This rough magic I here adjure." The Tempest, 5. 1
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