Synopsis
When Lord Geoffroy Loveall finds an abandoned baby, he treats the child as his daughter, despite the male gender of the child, who grows up desperately conflicted in the richest home in nineteenth-century England.
Reviews
This gender-bending romp about a boy raised as a girl in 19th-century England--penned by musician John Wesley Harding, writing here under his real name--more than lives up to the hype it will surely, ahem, engender. On a night in 1820, effeminate and ineffective (at least according to his mother) Lord Geoffroy Loveall, happens upon a baby abandoned in a trash heap. He brings it home to Love Hall, the grand estate that he is set to inherit, and pronounces the baby his daughter and heir. There's just one problem: the baby is a boy. Geoffroy refuses to accept this fact, but the happy news causes his ailing mother to die on the spot. The baby--named Rose--is raised as a cosseted and doted-on proper young lady, and the legitimate heir, a ruse that works beautifully until Rose begins to wonder about the facts of life: why, for example, does she suddenly feel the urge to pee standing up, like her friend Stephen, rather than squatting like his lovely sister, Sarah? Adolescence (and a few whiskers) only causes further confusion--as does the word "BOY," which begins to ominously appear around the estate. Eventually, Rose's cover is blown, and the scandal prompts several sets of greedy relatives to descend, claiming the Loveall inheritance as their own. There's a huge cast of characters, plot twists aplenty, loads of historical detail (including original Victorian ballads) and a satisfying, tied-together ending that also, in two epilogues, manages to offer up a poignant take on historical interpretation. Yet this lengthy and involved tale makes for speedy reading. Best of all, Rose's original narrative voice is engaging from the get-go: smart, funny, observant, and even hip.
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Charles Dickens meets V. C. Andrews in this literary saga of transgendered identity and dysfunctional family dynamics in early-nineteenth-century England. The novel is based on the song The Ballad of Miss Fortune, written in 1997 by John Wesley Harding (the author's stage name), about an infant boy who is rescued from a rubbish heap by a wealthy English lord and raised as a girl. The newborn, thrown into the refuse by a back-alley abortionist, is ministered to by a maternal stray dog until the mutt and her peculiar litter attract the attention of a nobleman riding by. The frail and foppish Lord Geoffroy Loveall, still obsessively mourning the tragic loss of his younger sister in a childhood accident, decides to take the baby and raise him as his daughter and heir. Rose has a happy, delightful childhood reared in the huge manor house of Love Hall until adolescence rears its ugly head. Once Rose's true sex and bastard origins are discovered, his greedy, scheming cousins (a family to put the Borgias to shame) move in and seize Love Hall and all its contents. Fleeing the only home he has known, a mustached and begowned Rose embarks on a series of adventures in a quest to come to terms with his identity. Michael Gannon
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