Take a photo of a barcode or cover
misshappyapples 's review for:
The American Heiress
by Daisy Goodwin
This is one of those books that are supposed to be for people who are missing 'Downton Abbey' between seasons but is really are for people who have watched 'The Age of Innocence' once and now claim they love Edith Wharton. It wasn't terribly good. It was filled with cliches and anachronisms and the sort of thing that are best left for bodice rippers that can be picked up in the grocery store. And yet, there were some genuine moments folded in all the drock. Now, did I like it? Enough that I couldn't put it down. I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen and how all this would play out. So, I suppose miss Daisy Goodwin (seriously, is that her real name? I actually almost wrote Miller) did what she was setting out to do; write an entertaining novel set in a very entertaining era.
Miss Cora Cash is the envy of New York. The heiress to a fortune in flour there's no one quite as lavishly rich as the Cash family and no one quite as gauche. Despite feelings for fellow society member, Teddy van der Leyden, Cora allows herself to be shipped off the England much as Wharton's Buccaneers did before her. Her mother's excuse is a London season, but the real reason, as everyone knows, is to catch a titled husband. Enter Ivo, Duke of Wareham, who discovers Cora after she falls off her horse in the woods and happily nurses her back to health and promptly proposes in his crumbling manor house. But Cora soon learns that English society is not the same as American, things that are admired in New York are scorned in London, and she might be in over her head. But when Cora learns that she might not know her husband as well as she thought she did the discovery might lead her to the ultimate scandal.
My favorite part of this book was the setting. It starts out in Newport, Rhode Island, among the monolithic country cottages built by the likes of the Vanderbilts and Astors and then moves to Lulworth, the Duke's manor house, and London during the Edwardian era. I'm a bit of a sucker for this time period. And the extreme excess of the Gilded Age is something that's easy to appreciate in this day and age (I often think we're in the midst of a new gilded era where the super rich have far too much and too many have too little). My problem with this sort of novel is that the authors always seem to need their characters to be the most. The most beautiful, the most rich, the most popular.Why can't the Cash Newport cottage be on par with the ridiculousness that is The Breakers rather than dwarfing it? It makes the whole thing unrealistic when it really didn't have to be. This sort of privilege did exist, for sure, so why make it absurd with over indulgences?
Also, the Double Duchess, Ivo's widowed mother who promptly married another Duke, is supposed to be a member of society that people looked up to and who ruled with an iron fist, the Violet Crawley of the bunch, if you will, but she was so outrageous that it was unrealistic. Taking over hostess duties in front of guests? I don't think so. That would have been intolerably rude and everyone would have known it. She could have made plenty of snide comments that would have been accepted with a smile and snicker into one's tea, but beyond that, just... no.
Finally, the ending. What? Really? All that and it was just so... stupid. There was no realism, no tragedy, nothing but a "this is what was going on the whole time and it was totally innocent and everything's great". The sort of ending that belongs to those bodice rippers I was talking about before. It was awful and completely unrealistic.
But that's not to completely discount what came before. This book wasn't good, by any means (as I am sure you can tell from my ranting) but it had a certain pleasantness to it that appealed. I would have been completely down with it had it been written by a different author with a slightly different plot. But titled Americans are interesting. It's also interesting that Ms. Goodwin felt the need to name her lead character the same name as the American character on 'Downton Abbey' who also married a titled Brit. Oh, and there's Cora's friend Sybil too. Oh well, what can you do.
Miss Cora Cash is the envy of New York. The heiress to a fortune in flour there's no one quite as lavishly rich as the Cash family and no one quite as gauche. Despite feelings for fellow society member, Teddy van der Leyden, Cora allows herself to be shipped off the England much as Wharton's Buccaneers did before her. Her mother's excuse is a London season, but the real reason, as everyone knows, is to catch a titled husband. Enter Ivo, Duke of Wareham, who discovers Cora after she falls off her horse in the woods and happily nurses her back to health and promptly proposes in his crumbling manor house. But Cora soon learns that English society is not the same as American, things that are admired in New York are scorned in London, and she might be in over her head. But when Cora learns that she might not know her husband as well as she thought she did the discovery might lead her to the ultimate scandal.
My favorite part of this book was the setting. It starts out in Newport, Rhode Island, among the monolithic country cottages built by the likes of the Vanderbilts and Astors and then moves to Lulworth, the Duke's manor house, and London during the Edwardian era. I'm a bit of a sucker for this time period. And the extreme excess of the Gilded Age is something that's easy to appreciate in this day and age (I often think we're in the midst of a new gilded era where the super rich have far too much and too many have too little). My problem with this sort of novel is that the authors always seem to need their characters to be the most. The most beautiful, the most rich, the most popular.Why can't the Cash Newport cottage be on par with the ridiculousness that is The Breakers rather than dwarfing it? It makes the whole thing unrealistic when it really didn't have to be. This sort of privilege did exist, for sure, so why make it absurd with over indulgences?
Also, the Double Duchess, Ivo's widowed mother who promptly married another Duke, is supposed to be a member of society that people looked up to and who ruled with an iron fist, the Violet Crawley of the bunch, if you will, but she was so outrageous that it was unrealistic. Taking over hostess duties in front of guests? I don't think so. That would have been intolerably rude and everyone would have known it. She could have made plenty of snide comments that would have been accepted with a smile and snicker into one's tea, but beyond that, just... no.
Finally, the ending. What? Really? All that and it was just so... stupid. There was no realism, no tragedy, nothing but a "this is what was going on the whole time and it was totally innocent and everything's great". The sort of ending that belongs to those bodice rippers I was talking about before. It was awful and completely unrealistic.
But that's not to completely discount what came before. This book wasn't good, by any means (as I am sure you can tell from my ranting) but it had a certain pleasantness to it that appealed. I would have been completely down with it had it been written by a different author with a slightly different plot. But titled Americans are interesting. It's also interesting that Ms. Goodwin felt the need to name her lead character the same name as the American character on 'Downton Abbey' who also married a titled Brit. Oh, and there's Cora's friend Sybil too. Oh well, what can you do.