A well-crafted historical romance built on a marriage of convenience.
A gambler bets on love in Matthews’ (The Work of Art, 2019, etc.) latest period romance, set in 1860 England.
Alex Archer never looks back, or so he claims. Decades ago, he fled the orphanage that was his childhood home and left his friends behind, piecing together a life for himself as a gambler. Now, his latest scheme is to leverage his winnings, wed a wealthy country socialite, and finally secure his own land. But his plans seem to go awry from the beginning when he stumbles across the beautiful, impoverished Laura Hayes. Her family has suffered financially since the death of her father, and Laura has been responsible for the well-beings of her brother, who’s in ill health, and her elderly aunt. Unfortunately, her family’s estate is controlled by a scheming lawyer, and their only hope is for Laura to marry before her upcoming 25th birthday to receive her inheritance. When Alex appears in her small town, Laura immediately sees him as a fortune hunter, intent on marrying her wealthy friend, Henrietta Talbot. But Alex’s plans are no match for the vagaries of true love. Despite his financial interests and Laura’s determination to avoid him, their fate is sealed when Alex saves her life. But before they can pursue their relationship, Alex must reconcile with his past. Readers of Matthews’ previous works will be pleasantly satisfied when Alex crosses paths with memorable characters from prior installments of the Parish Orphans of Devon series. Matthews’ storytelling skills remain rock-solid, and she spins a lovely romantic tale here. Her characters are familiar types, and the plot follows a predictable path, but that doesn’t make the journey any less enjoyable. As always, the background historical details are impeccably researched; in particular, Laura’s trip to the seaside at Margate provides readers with a captivating glimpse into Victorian culture. The description of Victorian bathing machines is intriguing, as well, and Matthews builds excellent narrative tension as Laura’s independent attitude clashes with the era’s cultural expectations.
A well-crafted historical romance built on a marriage of convenience.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73305-693-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perfectly Proper Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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