The Wings of the Morning

"Gripping...Fine story-telling."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Pequot Landing, Connecticut, is not the place--nor is this the time--for love. Yet Aurora Talcott and Sinjin Grimes are struck with it as by a thunderbolt--only to be violently separated by their feuding elders and catapulted to opposite ends of the earth: she to aristocratic England, and he to the trading hongs of Macao and the pirate seas of China. And left behind at home, growing stronger from her own desperate strugle, is Georgiana, the hired girl whose secret story entwines the fates of them all....
Selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club


From the Paperback edition.

Murder, suicide, elopement, an Algonquian witch's prophecy, a shipwreck, insanity, sudden revelations of paternity, a duel--a welter of incident, large and small, crowds Tryon's ( The Other ) big, old-fashioned historical romance, the first installment in the Kingdom Come cycle. Its star-crossed lovers are Aurora Talcott, pert, confident and just out of convent school, and Sinjin Grimes, rakehell, writer of raunchy, pseudo-Byronic verse, adopted son of sanctimonious lecher Zion Grimes. The real heroine, however, is not airhead Aurora ("I love him--well . . . because he's the captain of a fine ship") but young Georgie Ross, daughter of a half-mad Scottish miller, who grows wise through her multiple tragedies. The Talcotts, gentlemen farmers, and the Grimeses, proud shipping magnates, carry on a vendetta that roils their circa 1828 Connecticut village. Unalloyed pleasure for fans of this genre, Tryon's literate 19th-century soap opera is steeped in the rhythms of Trollope and Scott. 125,000 first printing; BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Tryon's first novel after a long hiatus is not a thriller but a juicy historical romance. Set in the 1820s and 1830s in the small Connecticut town of Pequot Landing, the novel tells of the feud between the town's two first families--the Talcotts and the Grimeses. The link between the two families is the miller's daughter, Georgie Ross--childhood friend to the rakish Sinjin Grimes and former servant and close friend to the Talcotts. Georgie is a levelheaded, independent heroine and her experiences highlight the conditions of women in that time. A failed elopement, a successful one, a dramatic shipwreck, and several brightly realized characters add zip to an engaging story. The first in a projected cycle of novels, this is delightful light reading that leaves one hungry for more. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/90.
- Janet Boyarin Blundell, M.L.S., Brookdale Community Coll., Lincroft,
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.