From Kirkus Reviews:
In this historical romance, an intriguing idea is diminished by clich‚d writing and a main character who is at first witless and insensitive and then almost lifeless. Hylton (Summer of the Flamingoes, 1991, etc.) starts out auspiciously with the story of Laura Levinson-Gore. In the 1920s, fresh out of finishing school, this daughter of a social-climbing American mother and a British father sails from England to Egypt with her mother and younger sister. On board she meets Egyptian prince Ahmed Hassan Farag, an Oxford graduate returning home. The two share a few kisses, but Ahmed has been promised to marry someone else and insists that their cultures will not accept each other. Although she has been rushed into an engagement with a man from a noble family, Laura visits Ahmed dressed in an Egyptian costume for a masquerade ball and pouts, ``I can look just as Egyptian as you can.'' He still resists, but while in Egypt she tracks Ahmed down and runs off with him. En route to see his parents and ask for their blessing, a bomb kills Ahmed but leaves the pregnant Laura alive. When her mother insists that she give the illegitimate child up for adoption, Laura accepts an offer from Ahmed's parents to live in a secluded palace. Later, isolated in the desert and then married to a cruel Syrian cousin of Ahmed's, she retreats into herself. Laura then chooses to send her daughter Rosetta to board at a London school where, naturally, she encounters the upper-crust offspring of her mother's long-lost friends and relatives. Hylton's descriptions of both people and places have a numbing vagueness to them: Ahmed is ``a splendid example of young Egyptian manhood.'' What aspires to be an examination of cultural difference instead disintegrates into a routine romance with a poorly painted, if exotic, setting. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly:
Only the most devoted Hylton ( The Last Reunion ) fans will find sustenance in this long, poorly plotted historical romance centering around a beautiful young Englishwoman ' s tragic affair with an Egyptian prince. It's 1922 when Laura Levison-Gore sails for Egypt with her sister and scheming mother, who plans to have Laura steal her cousin's intended husband, an English lord passing through Cairo, in order to insure the family's future social and financial position. But Laura's shipboard infatuation with English-bred Prince Ahmed Hassan Farag, returning to his native land to enter into an arranged marriage and take his place in Egypt's leadership, crimps those plans, which are completely destroyed when, after a passionate affair that leaves Laura pregnant, Ahmed is assassinated. Disowned by her family, Laura devotes herself to raising their daughter in Egypt. The death of another principal figure spins the story back to England, where it limps to an ending that hinges on the racism of Laura's snobbish family. Though Hylton's daring in killing off two of her main characters may be admirable, it's also misdirected. The narrative--already hampered by stereotyped characters--never regains the passion and momentum lost upon the prince's death, making this one trip down the Nile not worth taking.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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