Review: Complex shades of love
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 30, 2011
Written in stone and set in England, Viviane Brentanos' novel opens like a Hollywood romantic comedy--beautiful lonely woman on park bench sees beautiful harassed man, chasing beautiful disobedient dog. The dialog's superb--a novelist who really knows how to write dialect so it's readable, and how to create a transatlantic accent through word choice. There's delightful humor, dinners at rickety tables, the Oxfam shop, the "Baskerville howls" of the dog show--scenes and people brought to vivid life as Cassie falls for the handsome James.But true love plays many tunes, and author Viviane Brentanos moves smoothly from big-city romance to countryside retreat, betrayals on personal and world-wide scales, and beyond. Prejudice and presumption both wreak their havoc on friendship and affection. "But loving and being in love it isn't always the same," as Cassie's friend declares, and sometime you have to love someone enough to let them go.With sensuous restraint eventually thrown to the winds, the author has created the sort of romantic novel that just might linger in the reader's mind for much more than two people falling in love. An intriguing tale, with characters that break their stereotypes and situations that stretch and test assumptions, told with humor and just the right touch of pathos, Written in Stone rewrites some of those laws in love.Disclosure: I read an ecopy of this novel as a judge in the Dan Poytner Global eBook Awards.