So here's another selection of Essie Summers titles to be going on with.Spring in September (1978): Summers has an affection for heroes and heroines who get their wires royally crossed. This one lasted for 5 years which bugs me no end because when I read a book I'm already mentally planning how soon they can be done having children. (And I LOVE my four babies but we're on week three of summer vacation and Mommy's eyes are beginning to twitch.) The reunion of our lovers is complicated by switched identities, a near-homicide, and antique smuggling. Though written well (seriously, they are all great), because it has the 5-year-absence-because-of-fiddling-technicality trope I'm not a huge fan. Five years! I do not forgive her.
Not By Appointment (1976): It begins, "Jocelyn had never before seen her father take the manse phone off the hook." She's seeking advice after veering perilously close to falling in love with her married boss. (Isn't it always the minister's daughter...) She becomes an accidental nanny when she makes a wrong turn, breaks the hero's engagement, thwarts a bad-faith party in a custody battle and falls in love. Great things all around, not least the canoeing, the hermit's lodge, and a poem:
Not by appointment do we meet delight
Or joy; they heed not our expectancy;
But round some corner of the streets of life
They of a sudden greet us with a smile.
The Lake of the Kingfisher (1978): Interior decorator Elissa takes a wrong turn (Essie Summers absolutely, positively could not have been as fun with a GPS.) and breaks Logan MacCorquodale's (love, love, love the name) engagement when his fiancee' finds Elissa swathed in his aunt's frilly nightie and cooking him breakfast. No worries, though. A chaperone is on the way to keep things from detouring into Brighton (or NZ equivalent). Elissa helps with the lambing (lots of lambing in the land of Summers), watches children, charms antiquated relatives and schemes to get the engaged pair back together. Stacy, the horrible ex-fiancee' wants to convince Logan to buy a farm 'down country' (that's how you know she's horrible) instead of in the back of beyond. Darlingness.
Yes, about Spring in September I would agree that a five year separation is SUCH a waste of time!!! The only thing that saves it for me is that the hero, Morgan is a really nice guy whom we met in a really great earlier story (Bachelors Galore), and I was happy for him to have his own story. Other previous characters make an appearance as well.
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I do love Not By Appointment. I picked it up again just last week. Jocelyn deals with mistaken circumstances, who of us hasn't been frustrated by that! And instead of going to Brighton she takes the upper road.
Ina is a twit,
Harold is a nit,
the kids are a hit and
Jocelyn and Magnus are a good fit!
http://essiesummers.multiply.com/tag/not%20appointment
Lake of the Kingfisher is a rollicking read. Poor Elissa is a clumsy beauty we meet while catching up with minor characters from another book. There's a maternal mystery (lots of foreshadowing), a lascivious lothario, the customary kids,a spurned (not so)sweetheart, and a gorgeous setting. All classic Essie! This is also would me my favorite cover if Elissa was presented differently. I love everything else about it, but her!
http://essiesummers.multiply.com/tag/lake%20kingfisher
Betty Laurel
I love, love Bachelor's Galore (not least for the name) but don't have a copy. My local library has a bunch of Summers in large print. It makes it so hard to return to my tatty regular copies!
ReplyDeleteKeira, have you checked out page about Bachelors Galore?
ReplyDeletehttp://essiesummers.multiply.com/journal/item/93/2._Bachelors_Galore
I hadn't realized the the immigration campaign really happened that way. I have a friend from New Zealand, she told me her parents came over in a ship about that time, but since they never talked about it, she didn't know if it was on an immigrant ship or not.
If you want the book, there are cheap good copies if you look around. There is a golden harlequin here for $4
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B001G7KYD4/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&qid=1278782740&sr=8-4&condition=all
I didn't know Essie's husband was a minister on an immigration ship. How fascinating! Your links are so wonderful!
ReplyDeleteI wish I could take credit for the wonderful information, but there are three or so people who put in countless hours of work on that site and another Yahoo Essie site. A couple of them have moved on, but one is the admin of the Multiply site, a great woman who still dedicates a lot of time to our loved Essie.
ReplyDeleteWe are reading the books chronologically there and discussing them there, we get pretty silly there sometimes too.
OK, y'all can tell me to be quiet anytime, but I had a relook at Spring in September. I hadn't remembered Morgan as being quite so much older than Suzannah, or maybe just didn't notice. Here is a prime man, late 30s unmarried and childless. Weeellll, our own darling daughter got married last year, she was 24 and he just shy of 37. It's a match made in heaven, and they are now trying to start a family. Although I am grateful to God for our SIL and his family, Luke could have been a great father for at least 10 years now. Maybe I'll have to be a bit more gentle about the age differences now.
ReplyDeleteBetty Debbie's in-laws have one heck of an age gap. I don't think I oppose them too greatly in real life but in Morgan's case I think of all that celibate lonely bachelorhood he had to weather (5 years! In his mid-30s!) before he got the girl he wanted all along. It seems a waste.
ReplyDeleteYep, a waste indeed. There are some other considerations about big age gaps in Essie's writings that bother those of us in Essie's Multiply site, but they aren't pertinent here.
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