This week’s review is The Glittering Hour by Iona Grey. One of my favorite ways to rest is by curling up with a good book. Like movies and music, all genres appeal to me, and I give all books a chance to be ‘heard’!
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The Glittering Hour by Iona Grey
The prologue of “The Glittering Hour” had me pulled in immediately. My heart dropped with the last sentence of it and I knew it was going to be a good read.
Iona Grey creates a story about a once in a lifetime love while pulling in the reader with the main characters’ strong emotions of passion. It’s apparent there’s going to be an amazing love from the first time Selina Lennox, a daughter of a privileged family, and Lawrence Weston, a local artist, first meet in the middle of the night near Lawrence’s residence. The immediate magnetism and intensity of the two are strong and unrelenting casting the reader into a whirlwind of romance and forbidden love.
However, despite this rare love, there is an undertone of sadness. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was silent, unknown anguish laced throughout the story, interweaving the past and present as Selina tells her daughter, Alice, about a story of how she came to be.
Alice has been sent to live with her grandmother at her mother’s childhood home, Blackwood Park, while Selina is accompanying her husband, Rupert, on a business trip to Burma. The story is revealed to Alice through a series of letters and clues from her mom and with the help of the nanny, Polly. It doesn’t take Alice very long to figure out that things with her mom are not what they seem, and she is determined to find out the truth.
When the underlying grief is revealed as this story of how Alice came to be, it is done so in a delicate manner peeling the layers bit by bit. The weight of the heartbreak is unearthed in such a poetic and beautiful manner that the weight settles itself on the reader in a gentle rolling tide making the inevitable sorrow easier to accept. It’s pure magic how Ms. Grey was able to do this.
*Spoiler Below*
It was touching to have Selina reunite Alice and Lawerence while on her deathbed. She may have lost the first love of her life, Lawrence, but she realized her mistake and clung to her second love – their daughter, Alice. When the two are brought together, it was seamless and beautiful. It was a natural transition to both the reader and the characters.
In the end, as Selina is dying, the author gently pulls her away from us with a delicacy and grace that few writers can achieve with the death of a beloved character. It was an emotional read, of course, but it is a balanced emotion between the loss of Selina and the beauty in which we lose her.
We learn how precious love is, and despite the ease of which love can come, it’s not so easy to keep it. But sometimes love is worth the fight, don’t you think?
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Each book I review is based on my opinion. This does not mean you will agree with the review or love/like/dislike the book, too. There’s a quote that says, “No two persons ever read the same book” by Edmund Wilson, and it’s quite true!
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