Review: Worth Reading At Least Ten Times
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 16, 2013
This was one of those books Amazon chose to give away for a day or two, and I snapped it up. I read it once. Then I read it again. Then I read it again. I'm reading it for the seventh time now. After I read it another five or six times, I might feel ready to go read something else a time or two. This is a book about love--real love, feigned love, good love, bad love, the love of a parent for a child and a child for a parent, the love of brothers and sisters for one another, the love of a person who can help another--and does, the love of a person who can help another--and doesn't, because he or she does not know what love is, the love of a miser who loves money more than he loves his granddaughter and great-granddaughter, the remembered love of good parents who died within days of one another. It is the love of a nobleman who spends most of a day on a top of a house fixing a leaky roof; it is the love of a noblewoman who has learned surgical and medical skills so that she can provide medical help for those whom regular doctors will not serve because the patient cannot pay. It is the love of king and country that leads a man to offer his life; it is the love for common soldiers that leads a noblewoman to the front lines. It is the love of a man for a woman he seeks for years after she has given him a false name; it is the love of a woman for a man she is afraid to love because she can't believe he can really love her. It is the love of a child who subconsciously knows her father even though she has been told her father is dead; it is her weeping when she learns he really is her father, and her asking if he will ever love her, and her difficulty in believing that he already does love her. It is the wild chase across country to retrieve a woman and her child by her chlld's father and three uncles from a man who would kill the child to get the woman's inheritance; it is the love of an aunt for her niece that defies society. It is the belated realization of a woman that she cheated her child and the father of that child by keeping them from knowing of each other's existence. Reduced to its least common denominator, it is a romance, but it is so much more than most romances that it can scarcely be considered a genre novel.Oh, did I mention I loved this book?I would love to see it made into a motion picture; if I had the money and the background, I'd love to produce and direct it myself. It would make a terrific movie. I would like to meet the author and congratulate her on the wonderful job she did in writing so complex a book.