Author: Anna Lisle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by the author. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is sometimes reward aplenty!
Erratum:
p84 "I must try to staunch this wound." should be "I must try to stanch this wound." Any Victorian of breeding would have known this distinction.
This is supposedly an historical romance and mystery novel about Alice Clark who is (fictionally) the grown-up and 'illegitimate' daughter of Lord Byron. The actual daughter, who was initially named Alba, died at the age of five in a convent in Italy. The conceit in this novel is that Allegra did not die, but underwent yet another name change and was put into the care of an "aunt", eventually becoming married off to an abusive husband who is nothing but a cardboard caricature.
I don’t buy the premise! As beloved as Allegra was at the convent, I seriously doubt the nuns would have let her go to a bad guardian. Additionally, the Alice of the novel is nothing like the Allegra of real life, even allowing for some softening of rough edges by her upbringing in the convent, and some taming of her precocity by maturity.
Call me prideful and prejudiced, but the instadore between Allegra and the sea captain is nonsensical, and the novel's habit of switching back and forth between time periods for no good purpose and without much of an indication was annoying at best. I don’t buy the intrigue, either.
Byron died two years after Allegra, in 1824, and this novel - if it is indeed set in Victorian times (as opposed to Georgian which ended when the Victorian age began), cannot have taken place earlier than mid-1837. By that time, well over a decade had passed since Byron's death. Who would have cared if rumors began of an 'illegitimate' child, who had no rights to his estate anyway? If the child had been still alive, I think Mary Shelley would have had something to say about her welfare since she and her husband Percy took a serious interest in Allegra.
I admit I did not finish this novel because I had the hardest time even getting into it. It just did not appeal to me. Even the cover is a major fail. The cover model looks like she's about thirteen, not at all the age of the main character. Once again we see prima facie evidence that the cover designer never read the novel; either that or they simply didn't care what the novel says.
It was tedious to read of the endless and boring perambulations of Alice and her fruitless pursuit of the unnecessarily mysterious 'lady in black'. Nothing happened and then suddenly, nothing happened again, but right after that,...nothing more happened! As these nothings continued apace, I completely lost interest in it. Let me do the math here: 100 percent of nothin' is...nothin' and a nothin', carry the nothin', equals nothin'. I cannot recommend this at all.
