I am going to be honest with my blog readers — I forgot to write the last blog post for our read along!
My husband was having horrible jaw pain, had to go to the ER (which he never does!) and will need oral surgery so my mind just blanked on the fact I was supposed to write a final post about the last chapters of the book!
But on with the show.
These are my favorite chapters.
The chapters where all the sweet and subtle romance happens.
There are also some slower chapters for me in this part of the book, but I believe those slower chapters are meant to build up a picture for us of the love growing between Barney and Valancy.
It’s in these chapters where Valancy asks Barney to marry her after Cissy passes away.
She confesses to him about her heart condition and tells him she simply wants to experience some living before she dies.
She wants to live with him on his island and spend time with him and then she will be dead and gone and he can move on with his life.
Barney agrees, and we aren’t sure if it is because he loves her or he feels sorry for her.
She isn’t either but she is amazed when they travel to his little island across the water, and she realizes his home, amongst the trees and nature, is how she pictured her blue castle.
Valancy loves Barney.
She loves his idiosyncrasies and the way he loves nature and how he cares about the animals, such as his cats.
When they first get married, he makes her promise that she will not go into his little shed out back and she says she doesn’t care about his shed or what he does in there, even if he has a dead wife hanging on the wall. Lucy Maud’s sense of humor was so odd and quirky and I’m here for it.
They carry on life, scandalizing Valancy’s family who goes apoplectic when they learn Valancy has married a rumored womanizer and criminal.
Valancy likes to read and quote John Foster to Barney as they walk in the woods and he always rolls his eyes and ask how she can read such silliness.
Gradually Valancy begins to look and feel better. She’s full of joy and her physical appearance is showing it. The dark circles have disappeared and she’s putting on healthy weight.
The chest pains and dizzy spells she used to have have just about disappeared.
Life is wonderful and then something crazy happens.
She and Barney are on their way back from town and are crossing the train tracks when her shoe gets stuck in the track. Before they know it, a train if barreling down on her.
Barney tries to get her loose but she tells him to leave her. She was going to die anyhow but he has a future.
Barney refuses and is able to get her loose and drag her to safety.
Afterwards Valancy realizes that if anything should have caused her weakened heart to fail, it should have been that near death experience.
She is mystified and horrified.
She worries Barney will think she somehow manipulated him into marriage, that she really isn’t dying. She believes this is how Barney feels when he becomes distant and announces he will be leaving for a while.
Cue the misunderstanding trope, which I often hate in modern romances, but which works well here.
It’s at this point that I was hoping what I thought might happen all along — that Valancy will find out that she isn’t really dying.
How exciting it was when Dr. Trent finds out he sent the wrong letter and how realistic for me, someone with chronic illness, to see a doctor screw up a diagnosis or send the wrong letter. Apparently, this whole thing of some/many doctors being inept isn’t a new thing. Unlike some doctors of today, though, Dr. Trent apologizes profusely.
Valancy is happy she isn’t dying, for the most part, but realizes how much she enjoyed life when she thought she didn’t have a lot of it left.
Her world has been turned upside yet again, but her day isn’t over yet.
She’s about to find out who Barney Snaith really is for an old man is waiting by the river when she arrives home, looking for a way to the island.
Valancy soon learns this man is Barney’s father, Mr. Redfern the man who founded the company that produces the elixirs her family always tried to make her take when they decided she was ill. Barney isn’t a poor man who just loves walking through the woods with her and listening to trees blow in the wind. He’s the son of a millionaire. He hasn’t talked to his father in years, but he still has wealthy connections.
There is this whole hilarious part where during her conversation with Mr. Redfern, Valancy would think of one of the advertising phrases for the elixir.
“Dr. Redfern took out a yellow handkerchief, removed his hat, and mopped his brow. He was very bald and Valancy’s imp whispered, “Why be bald? Why lose your manly beauty? Try Redfern’s Hair Vigor. It keeps you young.”
Dr. Redfern tells her that Barney was engaged once but then ran off and now Valancy thinks he would probably rather be married to the woman he used to be engaged to.
I could relate to Valancy feeling overwhelmed at this point. She’s just been told she isn’t dying, she finds out her husband is the son of one of the richest men in Canada, she’s worried her husband thinks she manipulated him— everything is completely messed up.
I truly felt her sadness and despair.
After Mr. Redfern leaves, telling her he’s shocked that Barney couldn’t even tell him he had a wife, even though they haven’t spoken in almost five years, Valancy decides she needs to leave because she feels like Barney definitely only married her because he thought she was going to die.
She wants to write a farewell letter to Barney but can’t find a pencil so goes into the shed she was never supposed to go in and learns that Barney is really John Foster! All those beautiful things that John Foster wrote are really coming from Barney! He was derisive about John Foster because he didn’t want her to know who he was in case she liked him only because he was the writer she loved so much.
If you’ve read the book, then you might have been like me and yelling at the page because you just feel in your gut this is not why Barney left. Maybe he was trying to process things but I just felt that he was not leaving Valancy.
It was so hard to see Valancy go back to her depressing life with her mother and aunts and uncles.
I was just praying that Barney would come back to rescue her and when he did, I was so thrilled! The way he tells her that he wasn’t running away from her, and how he realized the day she almost died on the train tracks how much he loved her is just so special and lovely.
“But I didn’t realize what you actually meant to me till that moment at the switch. Then it came like a lightning flash. I knew I couldn’t live without you — that if I couldn’t live without you — that if I couldn’t pull you loose in time I’d have to die with you. I admit it bowled me over — knocked me silly. I couldn’t get my bearings for a while.”
What really upset him was that he knew he loved her, but he also knew she was going to die, and it drove him mad with sadness.
He tells her how his previous fiancé only wanted him for his money and when he first met Valancy he needed to know she wanted him for him, not his money.
Sure, he felt sorry for her at first when he married her, but then he fell hard for her.
“You made me believe again in the reality of friendship and love,” he says. “The world seemed good again just because you were in it honey. I’d have been willing to go on forever just as we were. I knew that, the night I came home and saw my homelight shining out from the island for the first time and knew you were there waiting for me. After being homeless all my life it was beautiful to have a home. To come home hungry at night and know there was a good supper and a cheery fire — and you.”
*sniff*
I mean, seriously…I just love this whole section. No, I don’t like some romances as much as other genres, but this romance is just so sweet.
I love when she says he shouldn’t love her and he says, “Love you! Girl, you’re in the very core of my heart. I hold you there like a jewel. Didn’t I promise you I’d never tell you a lie? Love you! I love you with all there is of me to love. Heart, soul, brain. Every fiber of body and spirit thrilling to the sweetness of you. There is nobody in the world for me but you Valancy!”
Valancy doesn’t believe him for a bit, and I just wanted to reach inside the book and shake her a bit and yell, “Girl! Wake up!! He really loves you!”
I don’t know about you but I was a little disappointed when they decide to travel the world instead of stay on their island, or at Valancy’s blue castle. I’m glad they plan to stay there for summers but I don’t like the idea that the two of them may become jaded by the world without nature to ground them. I guess that is why they decided to keep the little island and plan to return to it as often as they can.
This bring us to the end of our read along of The Blue Castle.
What did you think of the book as a whole and especially the ending?
