Review: History Told With Style and Grace
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2013
In this second book of the Cotillion Ball series, Becky Lower continues the stories of the Fitzpatrick family. This time, we're learning more about Heather Fitzpatrick. She and her twin sister, Jasmine, are about to come out at the cotillion when she meets a young Army officer who was instrumental in saving the lives of family members in St. Louis. David Whitman is a southerner, however, from a slave owning family. Heather and her family are abolitionists. In fact, the night she meets David in a New York restaurant, she and her family rescue the very slave he is in the city to find and take back. That sets up the conflict between the two as they fall in love but have to overcome their political and familial differences to find their way to a happy ending.Lower has the knack of weaving actual places and bits of history through a lovely romance and making it all seamless and fun to read. The time period she has chosen to write about is an important one in American history. But the battles and politics we've been taught in school don't tell us much about the consequences of the turmoil on the lives of ordinary people. Lower shows us some of that in her books with style and grace.This is the second book in a series but it stands quite nicely on its own. However, I would certainly recommend you read the first book. And pre-order her third which is coming soon. I have.