![]() The girls’ stories parallel one another in significant ways: Each has a romance with a young Frenchman, each has a parent struggling with depression, and each must consider the lengths she would go to protect those she loves. Chapters alternate between Alice’s and Adalyn’s voices, narrating Adalyn’s experience as a French Christian of the Nazi occupation and Alice’s attempts to understand what happened after the war. What she eventually learns both shocks and heals her family. The fully furnished apartment has clearly been neglected for decades and raises more questions than it answers: Why didn’t Gram talk about her childhood? Who is the second girl in the photos throughout the apartment? Why didn’t Gram’s family return there after the war? Alice’s father is reluctant to discuss anything that might upset Alice’s mother, who’s still reeling from her mother’s death, so Alice decides to find answers on her own. Over half a century later, Alice, Chloe’s 16-year-old American granddaughter, has just inherited her childhood home in Paris. Passionate, impulsive Chloe and her popular older sister, Adalyn, were inseparable-until the Nazis invaded France in 1940 and Adalyn started keeping secrets. ![]() ![]() Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible-if they have the courage to act. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). Rasheed sidesteps sanctimony, however, by infusing the story with humor, vivid descriptions-a diamond hangs in a debutante's décolletage "as tempting as the fly on a fishing line"-and a surplus of intrigue above and below stairs, propelling the narrative toward the cliffhangers of the final pages.īreathless readers will look forward to the next sudsy chapter in this planned series.Ī devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.Ĭady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Ada's emerging social consciousness-she gamely struggles against the pervasive sexism, racism and classism of pre–World War I England-provides an intellectual backbone for what could easily have been just another high-society soap opera. But the family's name is imperiled by scandal, and Ada's loyalty demands that she play the game, even as Ravi dominates her thoughts. At 16, Ada prefers books to ball gowns and dreads the byzantine formalities of the upcoming social season she'd rather convince her father to let her attend Oxford than find a husband. ![]() Lady Ada Averley, returning by steamboat to her British ancestral estate after a childhood in India, shares a furtive, passionate kiss with Ravi, an Indian revolutionary. A thoroughly satisfying romp for Downton Abbey fans.
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