Well, I just finished reading Julia Spencer-Fleming's IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER. And I bought the hymn (from iTunes) as sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale (remember them?) for .99¢ and put it on my iPad so I could listen along while reading. I do love that hymn anyway, and now I love it even more.
What a good read! No wonder she won so many prizes for this book. I have never in my entire lifetime of reading with such a huge thirst read such a wonderfully descriptive story of two people falling in love. This writer is truly gifted. Her abilities seem almost unlimited.
And there is so much in our backgrounds to make us soul sisters. We were both born army brats. I know Plattsburgh Air Force Base extremely well, as my mother, who was an Army nurse, was stationed there for some time and, because that part of New York State was her family home for hundreds of years, she went there to shop in the base commissary and to use the medical facilities after retirement. I used to go up to AuSable Forks to visit my mother at least once a year, and, after she got sick, several times a year, and then at the end I stayed from June to October up there with her, so Plattsburgh became very familiar. And the drive up was up the Northway, which has won a prize as the world's most scenic highway, and through Glens Falls and up to Lake George, the section of New York State in the book. Oh, the book does not mention Plattsburgh that I can remember; it just appears in the author's biographic paragraph as the place in which she was born.
Anyway, we have that part of our country in common, and then I was born and raised Episcopalian and my twin first cousin was a female Episcopalian priest, like the heroine in this book. Bea died in 1994, but she was a lot like Clare philosophically. Yes, I love this book and look forward to the next 6 in this series. Thank you, someone in here; I forget who.
