Week Five, Chapters 33-45: The Blue Castle CBBC

Past discussions:
Week One, Chapters 1-8

Week Two, Chapters: 9-15
Week Three, Chapters 16-24

Week Four, Chapters 25-32

Welcome to Week Four of Cool Bloggers Book Club (CBBC) for The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery. This week we'll be discussing chapters 33-45. All page numbers reference this Archive version. 

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What happened in these chapters?

Bonkers chapters! Valancy almost gets hit by a train because she can't resist wearing her adorable shoes. Barney saves her and then starts acting weird. After all that excitement with the train, though, she realizes that if she did have a heart issues, how could she still be alive? She goes to see Dr. Trent who told her that he mistook her letter for that of Miss Jane Sterling (Sterling/Stirling -  we all make these mistakes when we send letters about life and death, don't we?) and Valancy is just fine. 

This makes Valancy feel TERRIBLE because she only married Barney because she thought it would be short-term. She heads back to the island and who does she see but Dr. Redfern, he of the purple pills and liniment, claiming to be Barney's father and that he wants Barney to come home to marry his lost love! She heads into Barney's chamber to find something to write with and finds out that he is indeed John Foster. She writes him a letter telling him that she's not dying and that his father was there and breaks up with him because she never intended to trap him.

Then she goes back to her family's dungeon house and her mom is a dick. Barney comes in and declares his love for her and they live happily ever after. 

(Things I did not see coming: the train incident or Barney as a Redfern. Crazy!)

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Hat mentions (why hats?):

Then she put on her hat and coat, locked the door and hid the key in the hollow of the old pine and crossed to the mainland in the motor boat. (page 256)

The stranger wore a green hat and a light fawn overcoat over a suit of a loud check pattern. (page 264)

Dr. Redfern took out a yellow silk handkerchief, removed his hat and mopped his brow. (page 266)

Valancy had taken off her hat and was absently thrusting a pin in and out of it. (page 271)

She put on her hat and mechanically fed Good Luck and Banjo. (page 279)

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How many times did the Blue Castle get name checked in these chapters?

page 248, 252, 256, 264 (x2), 266, 267 (x2), 268, 271, 275 (x2), 276, 280, 292, 295, 305-306, 306, 310 (x2)

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Last week's homework:

My favorite line from the reading is: Thirty seconds can be very long sometimes. Long enough to work a miracle or a revolution. In thirty seconds life changed wholly for Barney and Valancy Snaith. (page 248)

This one really made me think because I frequently tell myself that I can do anything for X amount of time when I don't want to do something. I intensely dislike dentist appointments, but I can do it for an hour. Core day is not fun, but I can do it for twenty minutes. I don't want to go to that meeting that's scheduled for two hours, but when it's over, I can do something fun. So it's the opposite of how I live my life, really, and I had to stop and ponder it for a long time. 

And it is true that some of the biggest things in life happen quickly, isn't it? Life and death are given and taken quickly. 

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Other lines of note:

I was tracking how Barney felt about Valancy:

It struck Valancy more than once that Barney himself laughed a great deal oftener than he used to and that his laugh had changed. It had become wholesome. (page 237)

AND

"....But I told him I didn’t want my wife painted—hung up in a salon for the mob to stare at. Belonging to another man. For of course I couldn’t buy the picture. So even if you had wanted to be painted, Moonlight, your tyrannous husband would not have permitted it. Tierney was a bit squiffy. He isn’t used to being turned down like that. His requests are almost like royalty’s.” (page 245)

It had been beautiful because death waited. Now it was only sordid because death was gone. How could any one bear an unbearable thing?

I mean, death is always looming, isn't it? 

“Why are good husbands like bread?” Cousin Stickles asked why. “Because women need them,” beamed Uncle Benjamin.

I must admit that I laughed at this. I am an easy target for a good (bad?) pun. 

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Things I looked up:

Æolus - Name shared by three mythological characters who are hard to tell apart. 

The first Aeolus was a son of Hellen and the eponymous founder of the Aeolian race.
The second Aeolus was a son of Poseidon, who led a colony to islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The third Aeolus was a son of Hippotes who is mentioned in the Odyssey and the Aeneid as the ruler of the winds.

But it's hard to say. 

Quatre Bras - French for "crossroads" - literally "four arms" - this is a hamlet in Belgium where a battle was fought in 1815 as part of the Waterloo Campaign 

Samarcand - city in southeastern Uzbekistan and among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia (looks GORGEOUS)

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Questions to ponder (as always, feel free to answer as many or few of these as you'd like - talk about what you want to talk about!):

1) Were you expecting any of that? I mean, I think we all figured out that Barney was Foster, but any of the rest of it? 

2) Some of you were not sold on Barney's feelings for Valancy last week. Were you convinced by his declaration of love?

3) Anyone else want to kick Valancy's mother? It makes sense why she is the way she is, but does anyone else wonder where Valancy got her spunk? 

She had resigned herself to Valancy’s desertion. She had almost succeeded in forgetting there was a Valancy. She had rearranged and organised her systematic life without any reference to an ungrateful, rebellious child. She had taken her place again in a society which ignored the fact that she had ever had a daughter and pitied her, if it pitied her at all, — only in discreet whispers and asides. The plain — truth was that, by this time, Mrs. Frederick did not — want Valancy to come back—did not want ever to see or hear of her again. (page 282)

4) Was this a satisfying ending for you? Did you want something else to happen that didn't?

5) Tell me about your favorite line from this week's reading!!

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Upcoming CBBC schedule:

March 10: Wrap-up