Heartstones - Softcover

Rendell, Ruth

3.69

764 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345348001 ISBN 13: 9780345348005

Publisher: Fawcett, 1988

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Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not so sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny is afraid their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better -- after all, Luke has her to take her mother's place. But then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancee, and Elvira decides that she will stop at nothing to stop her father's marriage . . .

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About the Author:

Ruth Rendell is the recipient of several awards, including three Edgars and four Gold Daggers from the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association. Simisola, Blood Lines, Keys to the Street, and The Brimstone Wedding (written as Barbara Vine) are available from Brilliance Audio. She lives in England.

From Library Journal:

Less complex, less demanding than the full-scale novel, the novella still allows for greater character development than the short storyas the new "Harper's Short Novel" series will surely attest. At its best, as in Heartstones, the genre can deliver a potrait in miniature as incisive as it is affecting. Teenaged Elvira, precocious and self-dramatizing, loves her father obsessively, so much so that when her mother dies she abandons her "ordinary" younger sister to her own devices and plots to kill the fiancee that inevitably appears on the scene. Such is Rendell's mastery of psycholgoical suspense that throughout we remain unsure of the seriousness of Elvira's intentions. Rendell's is one of the series' three initial offerings, which include Colleen McCullogh's The Ladies of Missalonghi ( LJ 4/1/87) and Weldon's The Rules of Life . In Weldon's acidulous satirewhich, typically, skewers contemporary sex role expectationsa lay priest of the 21st century's Great New Ficitonal Religion seeks "the rules of life" by listening to the electronically recorded voices of re-winds (ghosts). Among them he finds Miss Gabriella Sumpter, vain and vainglorious seductress of the preceding century. Fans of Praxis ( LJ 11/1/78) and Puffball (LJ 9/1/80) will enjoy Weldon's wit; others may find it heavy-handed and eventually wearing. Though satire surely requires the puncturing of recognizable types, these far-too-predictable types have been done in before. Further, as types go, they are not very likable; when the priest, stuffy and censorious man that he is, eventually falls for Gabriella, we can't imagine why. Still, Weldon, like Rendell, is a popular writer; both these works will be in demand. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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