Stone Field by Christy Lenzi
My rating: 4/5 cats
“Catrina.” He breathes my name like a secret. I caught you.
“Stonefield.” I run my hands over the hills and hollows of him, exploring the strange new land of his body. I let you.
i think a big part of my affection for this book is tied to my love of its source material; Wuthering Heights, and the fact that i have read a ton of retellings of Wuthering Heights, many badly done, but i always appreciate it when an author takes the basic WH framework and does something unexpected with it; in this case, setting it in missouri during the american civil war, transforming heathcliff (stonefield) into a muscogee creek indian, and letting history have its way.
as with any retelling, it’s the author’s prerogative to cherry-pick through the original material, borrowing some elements, rejecting others, adapting the leftover pieces as needed, and some of the choices are obviously going to work better than others. but i think as long as you, the reader, approach this book knowing it’s a Wuthering Heights retelling, and you accept all that this entails, you’ll be in good shape to enjoy the book on its own terms. because reading the (many) negative reviews of this book, there seem to be two major complaints:
1) the romance feels like inauthentic instalove
and
2) catrina (catherine) is childish, unsympathetic, selfish, and stubborn (adjectives culled from several reviews)
most interesting to me is a review containing this line:
Catrina makes life harder for everyone but especially for herself with her reckless actions.
now, i’m not here to single anyone out or poo-poo anyone’s opinions, but that sentence right there is pretty much the beating-heart summary of Wuthering Heights, and the fact that the author made “her” catherine such a pill tells me she understands these characters and isn’t prettying up the love story like so many others who have adapted WH.
because i think people forget, whether they are influenced by the film-versions of WH or they’re willing to forgive bad behavior that springs out of Great and Terrible Passions, that catherine and heathcliff were both insufferable assholes. or maybe they remember that heathcliff was one, because of all the vengeance & etc, but catherine IS childish, unsympathetic, selfish, and stubborn. she’s the worst! i mean, except for heathcliff, who is the worst! and Wuthering Heights is nothing more than a gothic predecessor of naughty girls need love, too, and a tale of what happens when two people who only care about each other ruin the lives of everyone they know. which, thankfully, is not many people.
as for the instalove, while i definitely agree that catrina and stonefield are as insta-love as it gets, as long as you remember that this is based on a book whose most famously melodramatic line is “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (which is alluded to in this book with “Stonefield is my own self”), and you accept the idea – hokey as it is – that soulmates might recognize each other on first sight, it won’t bother you overmuch. it didn’t bother me, even though i usually eyeroll at instalove. but since i already had it in my head that these two were playing the roles of catherine and heathcliff, the expectation that they would be drawn to each other uncontrollably was already slotted in, and its suddenness is excusable. since this book doesn’t have the benefit of catherine and heathcliff growing up together and having their intense childhood bond to springboard them into romantic love, the inclusion of catrina and stonefield’s ability to read each other’s minds was a pretty innovative way to identify them as destined to be together without having to provide a “falling for you” sequence. “we can read each other’s minds and we think the other is attractive? must be love.” and while it might seem odd to have this science fictiony superpower in the middle of a book about nature and war and history, it’s no different from the ghost in Wuthering Heights – it’s not necessarily supernatural; it’s more of a literary device used as a manifestation of their love and their unbreakable connection.
in Wuthering Heights, the passion of the characters is mirrored in the wildness of the moors, and this one also celebrates the natural world – catrina has been creating her own version of installation art (which i loved); manipulating trees, rocks, water, and leaves into elaborate shapes and patterns, which stonefield observes and creates a “piece” of his own in order to get her attention. their love is conducted entirely out-of-doors, swimming, climbing, reading whitman and shakespeare together and celebrating their feelings and their bodies in their own little prelapsarian paradise, free and wild away from the prim and proper expectations of polite society.
‘cuz catrina’s definitely not well-suited to her time. she despises the corsets and dresses she’s expected to wear – preferring trousers or full-blown nudity, frequently covered in mud, and she’s reckless and impulsive and – yes – very, very selfish, but since stonefield is included in her definition of “self,” she makes no distinction between his needs and her own.
and their needs get pretty saucy. they are both very passionate and inspired by the fecundity of nature all around them. and once they start reading “song of songs” together, things are gonna get steamy pretty quickly. even before she meets stonefield, catrina wants a love that is intense to the point of destruction; a passion heedless of its own safety: I want someone who will climb right into me and explore every inch, knowing they might never find their way out. and this all-consuming love that burns everyone in its path? that’s the very essence of Wuthering Heights, my friends…
as a retelling, it’s better than most. and kinder to its characters. henry (hindley) comes across way better than he does in w.h., effie (nelly) is fantastic in a complete character-makeover, and stonefield is far less diabolical than heathcliff. zero puppies are hanged. his role in the tragic turn of the events is less about him being a vengeful monster and more to do with him being bad at communicating.
the only thing that really grated on my was this verbal tic of catrina’s (is it considered a verbal tic when it only appears in interior monologues?), where she prefaces way too many of her thoughts with the words “lord” or “lordy,” but in a secular way:
–I think I’m falling asleep, and Lord, we’re already at the parsonage the next time I open my eyes.
–Lord, everything’s topsy-turvy.
–Lordy, his smile.
–Lordy, just in time.
etc etc etc all the time
but for the most part, this book did not irritate me the way it irritated so many others, which might be down to my being a WH superfan and having a peculiar appreciation for authors who don’t sugarcoat their douchiness. i’ve barely scratched the surface of what this book does well, using the whole review space to blather about inconsequential details no one but me cares about, so i guess you should choose to read or not read this based on your own WH feels, and not on this dummy’s review.
