In the tradition of Philippa Gregory’s smart, transporting fiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal, featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the other searching.
Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by a father who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautiful and reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in their small English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father has given her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah’s secret serves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunite with May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after her sexual misadventures ruined her marriage prospects in England.
As Hannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herself falling in love with her brother-in-law. Alone in a wild, uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah is freed from the constraints of the society that judged both her and May as dangerous—too smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life. But Hannah is also plagued by doubt, as her quest for answers to May’s fate grows ever more disturbing and tangled.
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MARY SHARRATT, the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, is on a mission to write strong women back into history. Her novels include Daughters of the Witching Hill, the Nautilus Award–winning Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen,The Dark Lady’s Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare’s Muse, and Ecstasy, about the life, loves, and music of Alma Mahler. She is an American who lives in Lancashire, England.
Sexual tension and foreboding abound in this engaging but clumsy colonial potboiler. Sharrat's novel chronicles the travails of Hannah and May Powers, close English sisters who have been raised by their physician father. May is sent to Maryland in order to be married, but when Hannah arrives in the New World for a visit, she is informed by her brother-in-law that May has died following childbirth. Hannah suspects something sinister, though, and begins searching for the truth even as she becomes romantically entangled with her sister's widower. Sharratt succeeds in keeping the plot unpredictable, even as the characters, prose and dialogue are mired in cliché and awkward syntax ("How came you here?" and "Get you back to the dock" are typical examples of the novel's 17th century-speak). An over-reliance on shifting perspectives and chronological jumps also obstructs the novel's strengths, including interesting, well-researched period detail with an emphasis on food and medicine. These winning passages coexist queasily with sex scenes that seem lifted from lesser romance novels. The plot remains sturdy, however, leading to a conclusion that is well-orchestrated and satisfying.
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Though vastly different, sisters May and Hannah Powers have been raised as independent, freethinking women by their physician father. May, a lusty, vivacious spitfire, defies seventeenth-century British conventions, taking many lovers and chafing against the idea of a traditional marriage. Meanwhile, younger sister Hannah is secretly trained in the art and science of healing by her doting father. When a disgraced May is sent to America to marry a distant cousin, Hannah fears she will never see her beloved sister again. After their father's death, Hannah travels to the New World to reunite with the only family she has left. Once in Maryland, however, Hannah learns May is dead and finds herself irresistibly drawn to her brother-in-law. Although she is told her sister died in childbirth, accumulating evidence seems to suggest otherwise, and Hannah realizes she must unravel the mystery of May's life and possible death no matter what price she may pay for unearthing the truth. An authentically detailed period piece with elements of gothic suspense thrown in for good measure. Margaret Flanagan
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