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[New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1976]

I've been a casual fan of Barbara Michaels (the penname used by Elizabeth Peters of "Amelia Peabody" fame for her supernatural thrillers) since the 1970s, so I'm at a loss over how I missed reading this novel, which was first published as a Bicentennial tribute. The best explanation that occurs to me is that I did read it, and have just forgotten it because, well, it's definitely one of her most forgettable efforts.

Janice Wilde, a teacher at an inner city school in New York, comes down to Colonial Williamsburg, to spend the summer caring for her elderly aunt and uncle. Among the decorations in their 18th century home is a badly painted portrait of a young man who becomes one of the stars of Janice's vivid, and increasingly addictive dreams. Soon she finds herself obsessively seeking a dream world where she plays silent and unseen audience to a family drama playing out from 1774 through the years of the Revolutionary War. Meanwhile, in the waking world, she tries to investigate the reality of the events she's watching by tracing her family history back to the 18th century, and a plantation house called Patriot's Dream.

I'm a sucker for supernatural thrillers of this sort, so I was disappointed by this one. All I can think is that Michaels got herself committed to the idea of a Bicentennial tribute, then ran short on inspiration. The two plots, past and present, never truly mesh. In the present, Janice asks miscellaneous questions, dodges the attentions of three different men (there must be a severe shortage of marriageable women in Williamsburg that summer), and never seems adequately surprised by what is happening to her. In the past, she remains a passive audience, less than a ghost to the people involved. For all the connection there is, she could as easily be watching television rather than playing vicarious voyeur to their lives.

It's rather unfortunate that Michaels didn't simply write the past story line -- the better of the two -- as a standalone novel. The plot thread of a forbidden interracial romance between a Continental officer and a slave in his father's household whom he loves too well to take as mistress -- in fact the whole in-your-face double-standard of revolutionaries preaching liberty while keeping slaves -- was obviously the single idea that had really caught her imagination. She could easily have expanded it into a full novel by filling in some of the gaps between Janice's "dreams."

History-wise, she's operating pretty much at standard school-book level, but then she isn't an author who normally leaves a present day setting (at least not to wander farther than the late-Victorian world of Amelia Peabody), and certainly not one to read with the "critical" circuits engaged. It's simply set dressing for the story, drawn from basic sources (so, naturally, Tarleton is tapdancing the Bloody Ban routine for all he's worth). Again, the one area where she was obviously interested and read a bit deeper than the surface was slave relations of the day -- though the sideways admission that they got a far better deal from the British than the colonists had to be hastily smoke-screened by having the character who escapes to their lines die of smallpox almost immediately. If she'd been willing to think outside the box, just a little bit, she could have let the poor sod make it to Nova Scotia and a bit of farmland. It would've nicely solved the problem of what to do with a couple of the other characters; they could have gone up to join him rather than hiding in perpetual danger.

Anyone who's a Barbara Michaels fan has no doubt already made up their mind on this one. For anyone who hasn't sampled her writing, I couldn't recommend this as a starting place. Even within the realm of the RevWar, she has produced a far better offering. Ammie, Come Home, a nicely spooky tale about three Revolutionary-era ghosts haunting a modern home, was the first of her novels I ever read and remains a favorite. It gives a better indication of her strengths as a storyteller.

And if you like the time-crossed premise, and don't mind seeing it done for the young-adult market, check out The Sherwood Ring, which makes a far better read even when you factor in that it was written for the 12-and-up crowd.

[Thanks to Tracy Smith for mentioning this one to me, and setting me to wondering why I hadn't read it.]