About the Author:

IONA GREY is the author of the award winning Letters to the Lost. She has a degree in English Literature and Language from Manchester University, an obsession with history and an enduring fascination with the lives of women in the twentieth century. She lives in rural Cheshire with her husband and three daughters.

 

About the Book:

An unforgettable historical about true love found and lost and the secrets we keep from one another from an award-winning author

Selina Lennox is a Bright Young Thing. Her life is a whirl of parties and drinking, pursued by the press and staying on just the right side of scandal, all while running from the life her parents would choose for her.

Lawrence Weston is a penniless painter who stumbles into Selina’s orbit one night and can never let her go even while knowing someone of her stature could never end up with someone of his. Except Selina falls hard for Lawrence, envisioning a life of true happiness. But when tragedy strikes, Selina finds herself choosing what’s safe over what’s right.

Spanning two decades and a seismic shift in British history as World War II approaches, Iona Grey’s The Glittering Hour is an epic novel of passion, heartache and loss.

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I was excited for The Glittering Hour because it was a historical fiction novel not set in the WWII era. As much as I love that time period (honestly, it’s my favorite), it has become overdone in novels recently. We need variety as readers and this book seemed to give us that reprieve.

The Glittering Hour is set in dual time periods, in 1925 with The Bright Young People, a frivolous set of British society’s youth and 11 years later in 1936 with a young girl stuck in her grandparents’ home while her mother and father are away on business. In between these chapters are often letters from mother to young daughter, as the mother describes the details of her trip and sets up a treasure hunt around the grounds of the girl’s grandparents’ gigantic estate. I loved the concept of the treasure hunt, as it revealed details about the mother’s past to her young daughter. This plot point made me very interested in the story from the beginning. Unfortunately, the story never really piqued my interest from that point forward. I had to take a break around 30% because it was no longer holding my interest. The promise of the great reviews on Goodreads mentioning what was ahead kept me hanging on.

My main issue with this book is the terribly slow writing. The bottom line is that it’s infinitely too wordy for my taste. I would find my mind wandering in each paragraph and eventually had to begin skimming to get through the story. I wasn’t interested in the adventures of The Bright Young People because their exploits were shallow and vain. The only people in the story who sparked feeling from me were Lawrence and Alice, and their parts in the story were far too short, and still somehow still drawn out and too descriptive.

The plot of the story as a whole was incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking. It seemed like exactly the type of book I would love and honestly would have loved if not for the writing style used. I needed a quicker plot and fewer words to make this feel less like a tome I was slogging through for a grade in school. I desperately wish I could have connected to the story, the bones of an epic plot were there, but unfortunately, it wasn’t for me.

Please don’t just take my word for it. This is likely to be a popular read, being a Book of the Month selection for December. It already has numerous five-star recommendations from excellent reviewers and will surely hit the right notes for many readers.

Rating: 2 stars

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