I first encountered The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope, my senior year of college. Cate Stearns had read it onto tapes and lent them to me for my drive up to Hillsdale. I was enraptured. (Never have Illinois and Indiana gone by so quickly!) Tragically, the second to last tape was flawed, and I just couldn’t skip it to hear the ending. I got in to school mid-afternoon and rushed up to the library to see if they had the book. Fortunately, they did, or I would have had to drive to Ann Arbor right then and there to read it! I sat down in the midst of my unpacked belongings and finished the book before I did anything else.
I really don’t know why I waited another six years before reading it again, but I guess I’d forgotten how good it was. This fall I got it out of the library again and could not put it down. My house fell to shambles while I read, but it didn’t matter.
Katherine, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth during the reign of Bloody Mary, is punished for something she didn’t do and sent into exile to the Perilous Gard, a castle in Derbyshire with a mysterious pagan past. Kate is the kind of heroine I love–homely (she resembles her grandfather, of whom King Henry VIII said “he could never have told Giles Sutton’s face from a stone wall if the stone wall had not been so much the handsomer of the two”), awkward, intelligent, and brave. The hero is wonderfully flawed, yet ready to die for those he loves. It’s a great combination of history, romance, mythology (the story is a retelling of the Celtic ballad of Tam Lin), and fantasy. I’m not sure about the author’s religious background, but I was struck at how powerfully salvation and redemption come across–much more than in any overtly Christian YA novel I can think of. I totally remembered the ending, but it made me cry again, anyway!
Make this your Christmas break read! (It’s a Newberry Honor winner, so any legitimate public library should have it.)
Thanks for the recommendation. I was just feeling in the mood for a novel.
Your comment about liking that Kate is homely, reminds me of the heroines in L’Engle novels–mousy yet brilliant and, usually, virtuous.