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Katherine Sutcliffe's books

I have felt this great obsession lately with Katherine Sutcliffe's books, with my fragmented, faded high school memories of all of her books.

Her books have an intensity I long to study. I feel like maybe before I wasn't ready to go deep with emotions the way she did. I couldn't identify with those intense feelings. A lot of them really went over my head, and only now, I feel rocked with them.

I am thinking most of Once a Hero. It was one of the first of her novels I read, and I remember it probably imperfectly. The heroine was Bronte, the daughter of some kind of convict overseer in Australia. They get in a convict that happens to be a celebrity war hero in England, that happens to be Bronte's lifelong hero. She's devastated that he's a traitor, a common criminal. I think he's going to be executed.

I have no idea how they have a romance, but they do. There are these scenes that remain etched in my mind where Bronte is clawing out of her skin with desire for him, breaking into his cell and stuff, and they're riding wild horses along the sea shore in a lightning storm, and she's just lost her mind over him at several points.

There's another scene where she's going through this romantic old trunk looking through her mother's things, and he finds her there. I still have no idea how this convict gets out and wanders around so much. I just can't remember the story. I guess it wouldn't be much of a story if he stayed in his cell.

I also remember Miracle, I remember that Miracle practiced witchcraft. I really-really want to read that again. Devotion was my favorite, but I read that enough times that I remember it well, and feel more interested by the books I barely remember.

Miracle practiced witchcraft and lit a lighthouse and lived in a stone tower, or something like that, and she was also a devout Catholic maybe, and I remember their first love scene is on this crumbled Catholic altar against some kind of fresco of the Virgin Mary.

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