09/09/2019
A nine-year-old child pieces together clues to her mother’s wild past in this slow-building but dramatic historical tale of love lost and familial secrets uncovered from Grey (Letters to the Lost). In 1936 England, Alice Carew is sent to live with austere grandparents after her parents leave for Burma. Her only entertainment is her correspondence with her mother, Selina, who sends her clues to a treasure hunt that gradually reveals the story of Selina’s life before Alice was born. In 1925, Selina Lennox was one of the “Bright Young People” whose outrageous behavior often featured in gossip columns. Though Selina’s parents urged her to settle down with staid former soldier Rupert Carew, bohemian artist Lawrence Weston captured her heart. Told in a series of extended flashbacks, their romance is vividly drawn and heart-wrenching. Together, Alice and the reader come to understand that Alice’s origins are not what they seem—but that’s not the only secret the family is keeping. The novel’s final twist is a devastating blow that more than makes up for some plodding plotting during the buildup. This sweeping history is sure to be a tearjerker. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider. (Dec.)
2019-09-15
A treasure hunt leads a young girl to discover her mother's darkest secret.
In 1936, 9-year-old Alice has been consigned by her mother, Selina Lennox Carew, to the care of her Lennox grandparents at their ancestral stately home, Blackwood Park. The reason for this custodial arrangement is Selina's trip to Southeast Asia with Alice's cold, distant father, Rupert, who needs to visit his ruby mines in Burma. Alice is kept abreast of her parents' travels through her mother's letters, delivered by longtime family servant Polly. Alice is also directed, by Polly, to discover clues set by her mother, leading the girl on a treasure hunt that helps lift her out of her depression. Alice's Blackwood sojourn alternates with chapters set in 1925, when young Selina, age 22, is setting the London tabloids ablaze with her antics as one of a cadre of Bright Young People, devil-may-care upper-class flappers and their escorts. But everything changes when, on a madcap treasure hunt of her own, Selina meets Lawrence Weston, a struggling portrait painter and aspiring photographer. The two are drawn inexorably into an affair. Selina's choice of a passionless marriage to Rupert over life with her soul mate, Lawrence, is the fateful decision on which the novel turns, and her rationalizations will be a little too pat to satisfy most readers. Nor will readers be long baffled by Alice's hunt—given the 1925 backstory, the solution to the puzzle is obvious almost from the start. But genuine surprises do await, even if they entail punishing Selina, after the manner of post-Code Hollywood melodrama, for her breach of class boundaries, disregard for propriety, and unladylike smoking and drinking. The characters verge on stereotypical although there are no true villains and only the domestics lack flaws, particularly Polly and Mr. Patterson, the gardener who introduces Alice to the redemptive joys of nature. However, Grey's use of sensory detail, enlivening the most mundane of scenes, redeems this novel, too.
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.
