New Mary Stewart website

Jennie over at Jennie's B(ook)log and her twin, Julie, created a website at MaryStewartNovels.com. It's a great site for all you Mary Stewart fans out there. It has some great features: synopses of her books, cover galley, and (my favorite) a map of settings.

I started reading Mary Stewart in high school. I may have told this story before but bear with me. I was sitting in the school library talking with a bunch of friends. I had a copy of Gone with the Wind and we were discussing what we liked about the book. I said I liked the romantic aspect (although it's not a romance at all). My friend Katie grabbed my arm and dragged me out of my chair over to the Fiction books section and there she pointed at a whole row of Mary Stewart books and said "You have GOT to read these books!"

I said "Which one do I start with?"

She said "Any of them!"

So I looked at all the titles and grabbed Nine Coaches Waiting thinking that this one must have romance. I vaguely recall my thought process:

Coaches = Cinderella = Romance

OK, give me a break, I was 14.

Well, the rest is history. I finished off every book on that shelf over the next few months and then I headed over to the public library to find anything else written by her that our school library didn't have.

I loved the exotic locations (England, Greece, France, Austria), the suspense, and the romance. They were "kisses only" but boy, did my young heart pitter patter over those kisses. They were pretty tame by today's standards but pretty spicy to me as a naive young girl.

Here is my list of Mary Stewart books read with my 3 favorites at the top:

The Moon Spinners (takes place in Crete with a very spunky heroine who was played by Hayley Mills in the Disney movie - I had a major girl crush on her for years after that)

This Rough Magic (takes place in Greece and has my favorite scene on the beach when the heroine meets the hero for the first time who she thinks is shooting at a dolphin she is trying to protect)

Touch Not the Cat (heroine is telepathic and has a psychic connection to the hero, but she doesn't know who he is until nearly the end of the book)

Madam, Will You Talk
Wildfire at Midnight
Thunder on the Right
Nine Coaches Waiting
My Brother Michael
The Ivy Tree
Airs Above the Ground
The Gabriel Hounds
Rose Cottage

I see from the list of MS books that there are a few of her later books that I have never heard of:

Wind Off the Small Isles
Thornyhold
The Stormy Petrel

I need to look for these. She also wrote some historical novels based on the Arthurian legend that never interested me but I had heard good things about them. I think I tried reading The Crystal Cave but it was so unlike her romantic suspense that I gave up. I also haven't read the YA novels she wrote.

Some day I will dig up some of my old favorites and do some re-reading.