The neighbor’s forsythia bush bloomed this week, and our son and I worried that the frost that came the next day might kill it. At first, it looked like it had, but today more buds came out on not only it but the lilac bush in the backyard and many other trees around our house.
Yes, frost in early April. I am among those who are depressed about it being so cold in spring, but I remember the year we moved here, there was snow on the ground in May.
Talk about a depressing sight! I’ll take the up and down temperatures for now over snow, but my sinuses, specifically my inner ear, are not pleased with the roller coaster weather changes that have been happening for more than a month now.
We’ve gone from 30-degree temps to temps in the 70s from one day to the next some weeks. It’s also been very gloomy, with the sun often hiding behind clouds.
Today, however, we do have some sun, and it will be getting up into the 50s. In addition to the forsythia, there are daffodils growing up at my neighbors’ too.
Their bushes and flowers are so far away from their house due to their absolutely huge front yard that they really can’t see or enjoy the flowers or bush that pop up in the spring anyhow so we enjoy them for them.
With spring weather comes skunk mating season, of course, and with skunk mating season comes more skunks in our yard which is probably why our youngest cat, Cass, was sprayed last Friday, as I mentioned in my post last week. We didn’t realize until a couple days later that the skunk probably got him in the eye and we only realized this when his right eye started gooping up with infection.
The vet was nice enough to mail us medicine so we wouldn’t have to make the 45-minutes drive north but my Thursday Cass’s second eye was infected and by Friday the medicine had not arrived, so we headed to the vet to pick up an extra tube.
Between his nightly crying that started before the skunk incident, and now this, Cass is a bit of a handful, but he loves the kids and enjoys curling up with them and they love him as well. At first his adoration was for Little Miss but earlier today he saw The Boy in the kitchen window and came running to try to get to him, just at the sight of him.
He’s not a big fan of me anymore because I am the one who has to wipe his eye or put the medicine in.
Last weekend we went to my parents for Easter Sunday and The Husband hid some eggs for Little Miss to find.
I’m not sure how much longer that tradition will last since she will be 12 this year, but I am enjoying it while I can.
This upcoming week won’t be super busy, that I know of. I will be sitting with Mom one day since Dad has a doctor’s appointment and will take Little Miss to her art class on Friday. That’s another 45-minute drive because as I have mentioned more than once on this blog, it seems just about everything is a 45-minute drive from where we live.
I didn’t do as well this week with staying off social media. I wasn’t on Instagram a ton, but I was on it more than I wanted to be. I barely go on Facebook anymore because of how awful it has become. I no longer see updates from my friends. Instead, they are always pushing pages at me that I have no interest in. Many of the stories on there are also AI generated and full of inaccuracies and sometimes out and out lies.
I’ve had a stuffed right ear for about a week or more so some mornings it was easier to sit for a while and scroll. However, there were a couple of mornings where I broke myself out of that habit and sat and read a book or devotional instead. Those mornings were much more relaxed, so I hope to do more of that this week.
I hope to do more “analogue” thinks like journaling, sketching, and reading in general this week. The most relaxed I feel is when I am drawing, coloring, or messing around with my junk journal while watching an old movie.
How was your week last week? Have anything exciting on tap for next week? Let me know in the comments!
Nancy Drew: Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene
I hope to watch:
Bette Davis movies for my Spring of Bette, including Now Voyager and Jezebel.
I’ve already watched It’s Love I’m After, The Working Man, and Another Man’s Poison for the feature.
How was your March, and what do you hope to read or watch in April?
If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.
On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Thursday morning, as I mentioned in my Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot post (don’t forget to link your posts there, fellow bloggers!), The Husband had a tooth extracted with IV sedation and we thought it was going to be a lot worse than it was. The tooth was close to the sinus and broken so it was set up with an oral surgeon about 90 minutes from us.
I don’t drive as much as I once did because of my autoimmune conditions (vertigo, weakness, fatigue, aches and pains. All the good stuff.) but there was no one else to take him, so I had to suck it up and do it.
Long story short, the procedure went well and he was only a bit loopy on the way back, and the drive went well as well. That’s a lot of wells, but, well….that’s how I do it on here. Repeating myself and overusing words.
But I digress …. The Husband actually drove us to the dentist so I would know the route and then I drove home.
I thought he was tracking fairly well, but on the way home, he told me three times in the 90-minute drive that they couldn’t find his vein at first and he told me twice that they asked if he wanted a shot to numb him or the IV sedation. They’d told him when he first called that he’d have to do IV sedation so that’s what he got.
He also asked me twice if I had his prescriptions so we could drop it off at the pharmacy on the way into town. I told him both times that I did.
In the early evening, he came downstairs after a long nap to get some food I’d made him (soft food of course) and said he didn’t even remember saying those things, let alone more than once.
Luckily, that was about the extent of his loopiness. He did ask about 15 minutes into our drive home if he thought I was really that loopy or if I was messing with him so maybe he was actually repeating his stories on purpose. I don’t think so, though, because yesterday he insisted he didn’t remember those conversations at all.
I appreciated the prayers of friends and family because I certainly felt them.
Now, I would not have let my husband drive to his appointment had I known he’d barely had any sleep at all due to nerves and our kitten waking him up at 1 a.m. by yowling. This is a new thing that the kitten that was dropped off at our house in October has been doing for a week or more.
We have no idea why he is so loud and cries so much late at night and in the middle of the night. Actually, thinking back, it all started the week of Daylight Savings Time. First, he was crying at 6 because The Husband usually gets up at 7. Then he started yowling at 5:30.
Eventually, it was 4 and then 1.
He’s an inside/outside cat so the night before The Husband’s dentist appointment, The Boy put the cat outside via his upstairs window. The kitten, Cass, frequently climbs up the trellis, on to the roof, and walks to The Boy’s window and meows (loudly) to be let in and we know he can easily climb back down again. I actually watched his descent the other day and was very impressed since there really isn’t enough room for a cat to walk on top of the trellis. Cats really are amazing.
But they can also be annoying and Cass has been annoying.
So Thursday night, everyone was exhausted from a long day and Cass started again. The Husband was exhausted, still sore, and dealing with the aftereffects of the sedation so he took him downstairs and put him outside about 1:30.
About 8 a.m. I wake up to yowling from Cass and notice the bathroom door is closed. I figure he got locked in by someone who wanted him to shut up so I got to the door. I can hear water running and The Boy telling Cass to calm down.
I open the door and find out that little monster climbed on to the roof, to my son’s window, and yowled to be let in. When The Boy opened the window he was hit with the overwhelming odor of skunk.
The kitten, who is usually inside at night, had finally had his run in with a skunk and probably hadn’t been smart enough yet to leave it alone. So The Boy was trying to wash him. He still smelled horrible so he was put in the garage until later in the day when I let him out to explore outside.
The kids washed him again with a suggested mixture we found online but he still smelled horrid so he spent another night in the garage last night.
We all worried he might get himself hurt but the garage is safer than being out with the other wild creatures all night. Our basement isn’t finished and is full of dirt that The Boy is allergic to our we would have put him there.
I don’t know if some of my longtime blog readers will remember, but our cat Scout used to be the crazy one. Climbing a tree and falling out of it and almost dying and then climbing a tree and getting stuck in the tree so the neighbor (who is on the borough/town council) called the fire department for us. They came out with a huge ladder truck and rescued her.
Cass is taking the cake, though, and making us all exhausted and stressed in the process.
Little Miss was sick with a stomach thing this week too so we’ve had quite a crazy week. We think she and I had food poisoning from some fried chicken we picked up at a supermarket in the town where she has her art classes. Mine was more mild and I thought it was due to something else, but her nausea lasted all week and she threw up once. She only started to feel much better yesterday.
Tomorrow we are going to my parents for Easter, Monday we are going to pick up Little Miss’s new glasses and look for a new dresser she’s been asking for.
She says she needs at least three drawers so she can separate her sweaters, shirts, and pants.
She’s become quite fashion conscience lately and has also started sorting her clothes by colors in her drawers — not sure what that is about but we’ll go with it. I’ve heard of people doing weirder things.
So that was my week — not very relaxing or fun, but that’s life.
How was your week?
Do anything interesting? Or have an interesting week coming up?
Let me know in the comments.
If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.
On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie is a Hercule Poirot mystery, which I enjoyed, despite the fact it did not feature Captain Hastings. This was the first book I have read without him.
I love Hastings and was concerned not having him would make me dislike the book but luckily Superintendent Spence and the mystery writer Mrs. Adriane Oliver ended up getting involved in the mystery as well and they were fun additions. Mrs. Oliver was the most fun.
This was a mystery with two other mysteries mixed in.
The book also features a spoiler in it about Poirot’s future as I think maybe Agatha liked to channel herself a bit through Mrs. Oliver, but more about that later. I’ll give you a warning before I get to that part too.
The story involves Poirot investigating the murder of Mrs. McGinty, a landlady and house cleaner whose tenant, James Bentley, was convicted of her murder and is about to be hung when the superintendent calls Poirot because he’s having doubts that Bentley is guilty.
Poirot isn’t sure how to investigate a murder that happened months ago but agrees to try. He begins to unravel a mystery within a mystery as he finds out that three days before she was murdered, Mrs. McGinty read a clipping from a notorious gossip paper that featured the story of four women connected to decades-old crimes.
She even wrote a letter to the paper to say she had found a similar photo that would prove one of her neighbors was one of the women in the article. Even though her terrible spelling caused the paper to reject the letter, it was found after her murder.
Poirot is intrigued by her letter and her assertions that one of the former criminals or victims lives in the town.
Together he and Spence try to figure out who in the area might be a former 12-year-old girl who killed someone with a meat cleaver, a mistress whose married employer/boyfriend killed his wife, a wife whose husband was killed by a man who loved her, or the wife of a criminal offered the chance to leave the country and start over.
Where does this book foreshadow the future of Poirot?
If you don’t want to know about the last Poirot book, don’t read any further.
According to various sources, Agatha Christie wrote about the death of Hercule Poirot long before the final book in the series. She actually wrote about him dying somewhere between 1941 and 1943 and locked it in a safe for 30 years. She wrote it so early because she was concerned she might not survive World War II and wanted to be able to end her characters life on her own terms and not at the hands of a different writer.
In this book, Ariadne talks about her own character, how she can’t stand him, and it is suggested to her how she can dispose of him in a future book, after she dies.
“How do I know?” said Mrs. Oliver crossly. “How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something — and people seem to like it — and then you go on — and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.”
Robin Upward gazed at her with reverence.
“You know, Ariadne, that might be rather a marvelous idea. A real Sven Hjerson — and you murder him. You might make a Swan Song book of it — to be published after your death.”
Sound familiar? It’s well-known that Agatha grew sick of Poirot (though I couldn’t find the actual source of this statement anywhere online – do any of my blog readers know where it came from?) calling him something along the lines of “a detestable little man” so Ariadne’s description of her character seems to fit. And then the hint at how he might be killed off…again very familiar to Agatha’s plan.
Many of Ariadne’s quotes remind me of what Agatha probably thought about writing ficition, or even just writers in general.
I am sure I will read more of Ariadne in future books, and it will be interesting to see even more similarities between her and Agatha.
Agatha gave Poirot a wry sense of humor and that was on full display in this book as in others. I always love when he tells someone who he is an expects them to be shocked or excited, but instead they are often confused or have no clue who he is.
““His name, he noted with chagrin, made no particular impression on her. The younger generation, he could not but feel, were singularly lacking in knowledge of notable celebrities” ― Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
Overall, I enjoyed the book, as I said, but there were quite a few characters and it did get challenging to keep them all straight.
As with Christie’s other books, this is a pretty quick read that will lead you down a few paths until Poirot, and we, reach the right one.
Welcome to the A Good Book & A Cup of Tea (A Monthly Bookish Link Party)!! This link-up is for book and reading posts or anything related to books and reading (even movies based on books!).
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This was my first Margery Allingham book, and I was very impressed with her writing style and storytelling.
This book is called by Golden Age mystery enthusiasts one of her best. It is the fourteenth book in the Albert Campion series, but Campion isn’t really in this book as much as I expected him to be.
First, a little bit of a description that I pulled off Goodreads:
A fog is creeping through the weary streets of London—so too are whispers that the Tiger is back in town, undetected by the law, untroubled by morals. And the rumors are true: Jack Havoc, charismatic outlaw, knife-wielding killer, and ingenious jail-breaker, is on the loose once again.
As Havoc stalks the smog-cloaked alleyways of the city, it falls to Albert Campion to hunt down the fugitive and put a stop to his rampage—before it’s too late . . .
This one is more of a psychological thriller than a detective mystery with Allingham walking us through the story through action but also a lot of mental contemplations of four different characters, Campion being one but on a smaller scale.
Our characters are Havoc, Geoffrey Leavett, Canon Avril, Inspector Charlie Luke, Campion, and Meg Elgenbrodde.
Points of views are offered for most of them but not consistently, which sounds confusing, but it really isn’t.
If you have read detective or Golden Age mysteries from the 1930s to the 1960s, then you know there is a lot of what we writers call “head hopping.” The author hops in and out of various characters heads, telling us what each one is thinking in the same scene. These days we writers are told to never head hop. Stick to one character’s point of view per scene. If you want to show the thoughts of another character, then wait until a scene break of a new chapter.
Back in the old days, there were less rules, so authors just wrote whatever they wanted to and however they wanted to and readers just went with it. Sure, it could get confusing,s but if the story was strong enough no one cared.
I found myself nervous through a lot of this book as characters seemed to put themselves in the most precarious situations.
We start the book with Meg and George in a car together, talking about Meg preparing to go to a meeting with a man who insists he is her husband who died during World War II, which ended several years before. The man has been sending her letters. Meg and George are supposed to be married soon, so of course this development is unsettling to them both.
Meg takes her cousin, Campion, a private detective, and London Police Inspector Charlie Luke to meet with the man.
I won’t tell you if the man is really her husband or not, because I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that there is a mystery involving her husband and a treasure and it is tied to Havoc, an evil man who has killed many, just escaped jail, and will kill again to get what he wants.
I loved opening this book up on my Kindle when I had time to read it and had a hard time putting it down. I hope to get a paperback copy at some point so I can reread it.
There are some really well-written lines and paragraphs in it.
Here are a few I enjoyed:
“He was watching her, trying to appraise her reaction. The face she turned to him was both disappointed and relieved. Hope died in it, but also hope appeared. She was saddened and yet made happy.”
The rumbling ceased abruptly and a clipped schoolmasterish voice remarked acidly: “Very tood of you to bother about my immortal soul, Chief Inspector. I’m afraid I’d ceased to concern myself about yours.”
“Then he dropped lightly to the ground and a smile split a wide thin-lipped cat’s mouth in which the teeth were regular and beautiful.
‘Dad’s back,’ he said, and his voice was smooth and careful. Only the shadow flitting like a frown across his forehead and his pallor, which was paper-like, betrayed his weariness. His spirit danced behind his shallow eyes, mocking everything.”
His beauty, and he possessed a great deal, lay in his hands and face and in the narrow neatness of his feet. His hands were like a conjurer’s, large, masculine, and shapely, the fingers longer than the palms, and the bones very apparent under the thin skin.”
He was a man who must have been a pretty boy, yet his face could never have been pleasant to look at. Its ruin lay in something quite peculiar, not in an expression only but something integral to the very structure. The man looked like a design for tragedy. Grief and torture and the furies were all there naked, and the eye was repelled even while it was violently attracted. He looked exactly what he was. Unsafe.”
When he came to the part which was most important of all to him that night, he paused and said it twice. ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.’
That was it. That was what he meant. Lead us not into temptation, for of that we have already enough within us and must resist it as best we can in our own way. But deliver us, take us away, hide us from Evil. From that contamination of death, cover us up.”
I am looking forward to reading more of this series.
Have you read any of Allingham’s books?
Also, I just found out there was a movie based on this book made in the UK in 1956. You know that I am going to have to find it and watch it!
‘”Isn’t it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?” queried Valancy. “Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.”‘
Note: I have removed the password from this post so it is more accessible, but be warned that there are spoilers about the book ahead!
I read The Blue Castle on a whim last year and was surprised by how much I loved it. So much I am rereading it again this year.
Why do I love this book so much?
For one, I love how whimsical it is. I love how it starts out with us in the pits of despair and slowly we are taken on a journey that will leave us questioning the moments in life where we let others tell us our dreams weren’t worth dreaming
I love the sweet romance of this book and how Valancy wants love but when she finds it, it is not the grand, showy love she imagined in her dreams, but is instead grounded, secure, and a friendship that blossoms into love.
I love how Valancy steps out from under the thumb of her mother and family to find freedom to be herself. She learns how to live life the way she wants to live it before the option is taken away from her.
Today I am going to review the first ten chapters of the book and I’m going to be honest, these chapters are a bit melancholy as we are told that Valancy is depressed and hopeless many times within these pages. Some readers might be tempted to give up on the book at this point, but I pushed through and if you are reading this, you did too. Aren’t you glad? I am!
I truly feel that this book is most likely one of the most autobiographical of all of Lucy Maud Maud’s books, though I know she herself said Emily of New Moon was the most autobiographical.
Lucy wrote this book after her husband was diagnosed bipolar and she was dealing with depression. I am certain there must have been many times she escaped inside her head to her blue castle during this time and beyond.
This book was so eye-opening and really, in many ways, life changing for me. It made me think about my own life and how many times I have decided not to do something simply because I know I am expected to do certain things certain ways or because I know negative comments will be made by family members.
The idea of a woman being jolted awake to the fact she’s never really lived and that only she can change that by a difficult medical diagnosis is a fascinating idea for a story to me. That story inspired others, including me, to change their lives like Valancy did, even without a medical diagnosis.
There are so many good quotes in his book but the defining one has to be the one she reads in John Foster’s book, Magic of Wings: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all the evil in the world has its origins in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear and it is of all things degrading.”
Bam.
Those words are what will eventually spur Valancy into taking control of her own life so she can really live before she dies.
She begins to really live by slowly rebelling against her controlling family, especially her mother. Her family is used to her doing what they think she should do. They are used to her being obedient and quiet and boring.
I think that valancy’s first act of rebellion is to cut down a rose bush that is called “Doss’s Rose Bush.” Her nickname is Doss and the bush never blooms, much like Valancy’s life. She finds a knife in the garden shed and rips the bush out of the ground in defiance of it never having bloomed from her.
The rebellion and out-of-character behavior become easier after that.
Soon she decides she will no longer do the things she doesn’t want to do. Her mother can pout, but Valancy is done, and what strikes me personally is that Valancy decided this at 29, and it took me until I was 48.
I have hit a point in my life where I like to remind myself that I am an adult ,and if I don’t want to go somewhere or do something, I don’t have to, even if people in my life think that I have to or should.
I can’t believe it has taken me so long to shrug it off when I know someone in my life might be upset I didn’t do what they want. I don’t have to do what others want or expect of me.
What a freeing feeling.
In these first ten chapters, Valancy finds that feeling and soars emotionally because she’s finally shedding the oppressive presence of her mother and other relatives over her life. She’s finally pursuing what she knows will make her happy.
I am not saying I think we should do what makes us happy at the expense of others but there are times we do have to stop caring what others think and just live.
A few things I loved about these chapters:
How Valancy got the courage to go to Dr. Trent instead of the doctor her family normally went to.
Her decision not to let her mother tell her what do anymore, and the moment she finally stands up to her mother.
I love how the rebellion and realizations start slowly and just keep building.
Another aspect I find interesting in these chapters is how she compares herself to her cousin Olive so much. Olive is prettier and men and the family love her. Yet she is also single and in her mid to late 20s, so Valancy doesn’t understand why everyone seems to think Olive is so wonderful.
This is foreshadowing for future chapters in the book, but I won’t tell you any more than suggesting you keep in mind the phrase, “The grass isn’t always greener on the other side,” when it comes to Olive in the future.
One note on how this book is written — it is mainly third person but our author breaks the fourth wall a few times, like here, when she talks about Valancy’s changing lovers in her daydreams.
“I don’t say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew them,” she writes in chapter 1. “One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles.”
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the first ten chapters:
About the lovers in her blue castle:
“At twelve, this lover was a fair lad with golden curls and heavenly blue eyes. At fifteen, he was tall and dark and pale, but still necessarily handsome. At twenty-five, he had a clean cut jaw, slightly grim, and a face strong and rugged rather than handsome. Valancy never grew older than twenty-five in her blue castle, but recently — very recently — her hero had reddish, tawny hair, a twisted smile, and a mysterious past.”
On her 29th birthday, and realizing all she is afraid of:
“Afraid of her mother’s sulky fits — afraid of offending Uncle Benjamin — afraid of becoming a target for Aunt Wellington’s contempt — afraid of Aunt Isabel’s biting comments—afraid of Uncle James’ disapproval — afraid of offending the whole clan’s opinions and prejudices —afraid of not keeping up appearances —afraid to say what she really thought of anything — afraid of poverty in her old age. Fear — fear — fear she could never escape from it. It bound her and enmeshed her like a spider’s web of steel. Only in her Blue Castle could she find temporary release. And this morning Valancy could not believe she had a Blue Castle. She would never be able to find it again. Twenty-nine, unmarried, undesired — what had she to do with the fairy-like chatelaine of the Blue Castle? She would cut such childish nonsense out of her life forever and face reality unflinchingly.”
““But though she was not afraid of death, she was not indifferent to it. She found that she resented it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived.”
“She made a discovery that surprised her; she, who had been afraid of almost everything in life, was not afraid of death. It did not seem in the least terrible to her. And she need not now be afraid of anything else. Why had she been afraid of things? Because of life.”
“She found she resented it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived. Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by —not because she had no future but because she had no past.”
“Fear is the original sin,” wrote John Foster. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.”
What are some of your favorite moments in the first ten chapters?
Do you think that Valancy becomes a little too callous and maybe even a little rude to family as she works out how to be free of them or do they deserve the treatment they receive?
Do you have a favorite quote from these chapters?
The next blog post will cover Chapter 11 to 23 and won’t be up until February 27 so if you are behind and following these posts as they are first posted, you have plenty of time. If you are following these posts somewhere down the road, read the next post whenever you are ready!
I am re-reading The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery and decided I would write some blog posts for anyone who wants to read along with me. I originally was going to write these posts only in February, but I they will stretch into March as well now. One, I am behind on reading the book and two, that means I am behind on writing the blog posts I wanted to write for this read-along.
There will be spoilers in the chapter review posts posts so you are warned.
My plan was to password protect any of the posts with spoilers, but readers were having a hard time commenting so I removed the password protection. Scroll past them at your own risk if you have not read the book yet and want to.
If you don’t have time to read the book this month, don’t worry. These posts will be up for you to look at anytime.
A little history of our author
For this first post, I’m going to give a little background on our author and the book.
Here is a description of the book from Goodreads for those unfamiliar with it:
An unforgettable story of courage and romance. Will Valancy Stirling ever escape her strict family and find true love?
Valancy Stirling is 29, unmarried, and has never been in love. Living with her overbearing mother and meddlesome aunt, she finds her only consolation in the “forbidden” books of John Foster and her daydreams of the Blue Castle–a place where all her dreams come true, and she can be who she truly wants to be. After getting shocking news from the doctor, she rebels against her family and discovers a surprising new world, full of love and adventures far beyond her most secret dreams.
The book is considered to be one of a few books written for adults by L.M. Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables and a series of books about Anne, which are considered children’s books. They are very long children’s books, I do have to say though, and I can’t imagine today’s kids reading all of the books in the series because the ones after Anne are very wordy. Good, but wordy. And old-fashioned wordy at that too.
I am going to put a disclaimer in here for anyone who tries The Blue Castle for the first time. The first ten chapters are a bit repetitive with how depressed and oppressed our main character is. I urge you to not give up because slowly you are going to notice subtle changes in Valancy that are going to become not-so-subtle changes and eventually all-out rebellious changes that will forever change her life. In other words, the book picks up by chapter 11, and the chapters are short. Fear not!
Okay, now back to a bit of history about our author.
Many of you probably already know that L.M. stands for Lucy Maud.
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in New London, Canada. It was called Clifton, Canada at that time.
She had a sad beginning with her mother dying from tuberculosis when Lucy Maud was almost two. Her father left her in the care of her mother’s parents, Alexander and Lucy Maud Wooner Macneill of Cavendish and then moved to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and remarried. He never returned for his daughter, who was called Maud after she moved in with her grandparents since her grandmother’s name was also Lucy.
Reading about her early life helped me better understand why Lucy Maud was able to write Anne Shirley’s story so well. No, Lucy Maud was not adopted in the strict sense of the word. She had parents and she lived with family after her mom passed and her father left, but an orphan spirit remained within her.
Lucy Maud was an only child living with her 50-something grandparents so her imagination, nature, books, and writing became her friends.
She started keeping a journal and writing poetry at the age of nine. She became more serious about her journal writing at the age of 14.
She completed her early education at a one-room school near her grandparents’ home, spending only one year with her father and his new wife in Prince Albert.
It was while in Prince Albert that she had her first published piece, a poem called On Cape LeForce, appear in a Prince Edward Island newspaper.
Lucy Maud eventually earned a teaching degree and taught school for three years, six months of those on Prince Edward Island, before she returned to Cavendish to care for her grandmother after her grandfather died. Sound familiar at all, Anne fans?
Lucy Maud remained with her grandmother for the next thirteen years, with the only break being a nine-month period in 1901-1902 when she worked as a proof-reader for The Daily Echo in Halifax. She wrote many of her popular works while living with her grandmother but first wrote stories or articles for various magazines and publications, working her way up until she was earning $500 a year, which was a hefty sum back then.
She wrote her first and most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables in 1905 but it was not published until 1908 due to it repeatedly being rejected by publishers who had no idea it would become such a beloved novel and, in the future, a cultural phenomenon. It would also bring a great deal of tourism to Prince Edward Island, where the book took place and where Lucy Maud lived for the first half of her life.
Source: Canadian Geographic
When her grandmother died, Lucy Maud married Rev. Ewan McDonald, who she’d actually been secretly engaged to since 1906.
I wish I could say her marriage was a good one but in truth it was not very happy and Lucy herself wrote in her journal sometime after the wedding, “When it was all over and I found myself sitting there by my husband’s side … I felt a sudden horrible onrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!”
Lucy definitely wanted to be free years later when she and her husband both struggled with their mental health. Her with depression and him with “manic-depressive insanity” (now known as bi-polar) which he was diagnosed with after World War I.
Rev. Macdonald
Mental illness was considered shameful at the time, so Lucy hid her and her husband’s condition. Sometimes she wrote his sermons so he could read them in church and if he was incapable of even reading them, she told everyone he’d had to go out of town..
After I found all this out, I realized one reason she wrote a book about a woman trying to break free of her mundane and difficult life after she was married was because she desperately wanted to escape her real life. She essentially said so in a 1925 journal entry.
“I have enjoyed writing it very much. It seemed a refuge from the cares and worries of my real world.” (Feb. 8, 1925)
When she finished it, she wrote, “I am sorry it is done. It has been for several months a daily escape from a world of intolerable realities.” (Mar. 10, 1925)
Marriage did bring at least something good to Lucy Maud.
Children. She had two sons (Chester Cameron in July 1912 and Ewan Stuart in October 1915 with a stillborn birth (Hugh Alexander, in August 1914 ) in between. Being a mom what she had always wanted and she wrote in her journal that motherhood “pays for all.”
She did not, however, enjoy being the wife of a minister, preferring to write in her locked front parlor, to visiting with the people of the town they moved to, pulling her from her beloved Prince Edward Island.
“To all I try to be courteously tactful and considerate, and most of them I like superficially,” she wrote in her journal, “but the gates of my soul are barred against them. They do not have the key.”
While many readers of Lucy Maud’s work would call the first Anne book (yes, there is a series of eight books featuring Anne or her family) the best she’s written, Lucy Maud herself favored Emily of New Moon because the story of a young girl trying to be a published writer when her family was so scandalized at the idea, mirrored Lucy Maud’s own life so closely.
Lucy Maud had an Aunt Emily, but she most likely based mean Aunt Elizabeth in Emily of New Moon on her Aunt Emily, many scholars say.
A cousin, the daughter of Aunt Emily, said her mother once tossed down a copy of A Tangled Web, another “adult” book by Lucy Maud, and said, “I’m ashamed to know her!”
While it’s never been made clear why Emily didn’t like her niece’s writing, some Lucy Maud scholars think it is because Emily longed to be a writer herself but couldn’t because of society’s constraints.
If you would like to read more about Lucy Maud’s life, by the way, you can pick up her memoir, The Alpine Path, which I hope to pick up someday or The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio, considered to be the definitive biography of her life. I also hope to read that one too. Much of what we know now about Lucy Maud came from her memoir and her own diaries, which Rubio used as the sources for her book.
“Forty years after Montgomery’s death, her inner life was finally revealed through her personal diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, private correspondence and original manuscripts, all donated to the University of Guelph by her youngest son, Stuart,” Rosemary Counter wrote for Canadian Geographic in 2024. “Through them, Rubio and the close-knit community of Anne scholars would dive well beyond her books and deep into the mind of their author. For nearly a century, by design, if you knew Anne, you knew Montgomery. But all that was about to change.”
Lucy Maud suffered with anxiety at night. She often paced her floors, unclenching and clenching her hands.
She was known to take a cocktail of various drugs to help her anxiety and depression, and in 1942, after sending her manuscript, The Blythes are Quoted, off to her publisher, she took one of those cocktails, lay down, and never woke up again. She was 67.
As far as anyone in the family knew, her death was a total accident.
A couple of years ago, though, a news story came out with information from Lucy’s granddaughter, who wanted the public to know that even though the story had always been that Lucy accidentally overdosed, the family had lied out of embarrassment. There had actually been a note written by Lucy that may or may not have been a suicide note.
“May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand.”
Her son, Stuart, pocketed the note to protect her reputation, but 60-years-later Stuart’s daughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, wanted anyone suffering from mental illness to know they were not alone and could reach out for help, something Lucy Maud felt she couldn’t do.
Lucy Maud and The Blue Castle
According to Rubio, Lucy Maud was always considered a children’s book author, so when she published The Blue Castle, people were a bit thrown off.
“Its mature subject got it banned for children in a number of places” Rubio said. “While she was censored for mentioning an unwed mother (who dies, no less), young writers like [Morley] Callaghan were earning praise for sympathetic treatment of down-and-outers and prostitutes.”
Despite the backlash, The Blue Castle was a success. She wrotein her journal on Jan.22, 1927 that she received a letter from her publisher, Mr. Stokes, saying that “they have done so well with it that he wants me to write another similar to it as soon as possible.”
Some readers say A Tangled Web was that “similar book.”
Sometime in the 1990s, The Blue Castle became popular again and it has been on the reading lists of many classic book readers ever since.
If you would like to read my impressions of chapters 1 to 10 you can click this link and you will be brought to a password protected post. If you have read the book and want to discuss it with me the password is simply the word BLUE.
I am re-reading The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery and decided I would write some blog posts for anyone who wants to read along with me.
Originally I was going to write these posts for the month of February, focusing on ten chapters a week, but I am probably going to also share post into March as well now. One, I am behind on reading the book and two, that means I am behind on writing the blog posts I wanted to write for this read along.
I seem to always bite off more than I can chew, and had considered canceling these posts, but I really like the book and want to share it with others so I am going to let go of my desire to present my thoughts on the book in a certain way go and just get to posts when I can.
There will be some spoilers in some these posts so my plan is to alert readers if there is a spoiler and to password protect any spoiler posts.
I will post my first two posts Friday. One will be about L.M. Montgomery and the book and the other will be password protected and will discuss the first ten chapters.
I will give you the password in case you want to read the post.
Otherwise it will be hidden from other blog readers who might not want to see an unexpected spoiler.
The password for all the discussion posts will be BLUE.
If you don’t have time to read the book this month, don’t worry. These posts will be up for you to look at at anytime.
