November 5, 2007
Rice continues to explore mother-daughter dynamics and themes of religion and destiny in her serviceable latest (after What Matters Most
). Anthropologist Susannah Connolly, encouraged by her mentor Professor Helen Oakes, travels to the Camargue region in southern France for research and to fulfill a promise to Susannah's recently deceased mother to visit a statue of Sarah, a religious figure of the Romany people whose power supposedly helped Susannah's parents conceive their only daughter. Filled with guilt that she was far away at work when her mother died, Susannah is taunted and branded as indifferent by her former flame Ian Stewart, an ambitious colleague who creepily follows her to France and tries to persuade her to marry him. But after Grey, a French horse rancher, saves Susannah from big trouble in a marsh, their chemistry sizzles in tired prose (“Susannah was different from anyone he'd ever knownâ€) as Grey, whose wife left him five years earlier, agonizes about bringing a new woman into his family. While the story provides some intrigue (a group of Romany women connected to Grey's wife take Susannah into their confidence), the narrative is maddeningly repetitive and the lovey-dovey passages dull. All of Rice's hallmarks are present, though this time out they don't pop.
November 15, 2007
Susannah Connolly has just lost her mother to cancer and decides she needs a break, both fromher work as a cultural anthropologist andfallout after the breakup of a long-term relationship with an associate. She travels to the Camargue region of southern France, fulfilling a promise to her mother to visit the church at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the resting place of Sarah the Black, the Gypsies patron whom her mother believed helped her to conceive Susannah after10 childless years. There Susannah meets Grey Dempsey, an American expatriate who has a horse ranch nearby. Grey is raising his daughter, Sari, alone, since her Gypsy mother left them five years earlier. Still traumatized, Sariis unable to accept another woman in her fathers life, fearing thatshell lose him as well. But what can Grey and Susannah do? Theyre in love. Rice utilizes the surreal landscape of the Camargue and the haunting legend surrounding Sarah and the cult of her disciples to perfection, drawing the reader into her story until the last obstacle to romance disappears.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)