A thoughtfully executed tale that perceptively dramatizes the tension between the demands of love and commerce.
In this romance set in the early 19th century, a young woman finds herself pursued by an uncouth and relentless duke who’ll stop at nothing to possess her.
Once her grandfather dies, Phyllida Satterthwaite is left alone in the world as well as virtually penniless—both of her parents died shortly after she was born. She’s taken into the care of her uncle, Edgar Townsend, who lets her modest estate in the country and brings her to London to pair her with a husband. Unfortunately, the duke of Moreland takes an avid interest in her, a man so notorious for his maniacal pursuit of objects of beauty he’s nicknamed “the Collector.” Phyllida, now his quarry, becomes known as the “Work of Art.” The duke is an unreservedly unsavory human being—he beats dogs and is suspected of murdering his wife. Phyllida refuses his hand in marriage, but the duke makes it clear he never asked for it in the first place. Edgar likewise views their union as a financial transaction, one for which the duke paid handsomely. She turns to Capt. Arthur Heywood, a friendly acquaintance, for help, and he chivalrously offers to wed her, a “marriage in name only” that rescues her from the duke’s salacious attention. But the duke is not so easily defeated, and the new pair is threatened by the prospect of his “swift and brutal retaliation.” The duke remains a hyperbolically unsubtle caricature in an otherwise intelligently nuanced novel by Matthews (A Modest Independence, 2019). The author seamlessly combines a suspenseful tale and a soaring romance, the plot by turns sweetly moving and dramatically stirring. The relationship between Phyllida and Arthur is especially well crafted—what was initially a partnership borne out of practicality and mutual respect slowly shows promise of blossoming into something more transcendent. Occasionally, Matthews can be a bit heavy-handed with her narrative commentary; for example, she feels the need, after repeatedly making the point that the duke sees Phyllida as a trophy rather than a person, to tell readers that she really isn’t: “But she was no painting. She was a human being.” Nevertheless, the story as a whole is filled with tenderness and intrigue and is sure to delight lovers of the genre.
A thoughtfully executed tale that perceptively dramatizes the tension between the demands of love and commerce.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73305-691-5
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Perfectly Proper Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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