โ Scribed by Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Aficionados of Yarbro's long-running Saint-Germain series (Blood Roses, etc.) will find this related novel to their liking, though its female point of view lends a different emphasis and emotional texture. French vampire Madelaine de Montalia, younger by many centuries than Saint-Germain, is not as immured to the pain of loving and losing mortals as her vampiric friend, lover and mentor. In 1845, Madelaine sets out to live with and study American Indian tribes in an effort to document their culture and knowledge before they're lost forever. (Admirably accurate research makes one wish these anthropological journals truly existed.) Arriving in 1855 San Francisco, the beautiful, charismatic Madelaine-who appears to be no more than 20 years oldรขะ ะะฒะัะยฌ"and her banker, the unhappily married William Tecumseh Sherman, fall passionately in love. Madelaine eventually finds herself trapped in 1860 Alabama facing the vicissitudes of civil war. Sherman, who was actually a partner in a San Francisco bank before the Civil War, necessarily receives short shrift as a supporting character, but his role does allow Madelaine to make her points about the true meaning of undying love. Romance and history predominate in a story whose horrors, as in the Saint-Germain novels, are all of human origin.
Copyright ''ยฉ Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Yarbro steps away from her St. Germaine series to follow the fortunes of one of the vampire count's many lovers, Madelaine de Montalia, whom St. Germaine fell in love with in the very first novel in the series, Hotel Transylvania (1978). Madelaine, also a vampire, leaves her home in London to travel to the U.S. to write a book about Indians in the mid-1800s. The country is inching toward civil war when Madelaine meets William Tecumseh Sherman, a senior officer at her bank in San Francisco. The two are immediately drawn to one another, despite the fact that Sherman is married and extremely devoted to his children. His wife is away visiting her parents, allowing the beginning of a passionate affair. Circumstance separates them when Madelaine heads off to study Indian tribes and Sherman is pulled back toward a military career, but they are fated to meet again. An engaging blend of historical fiction and romance. Kristine Huntley
Copyright ''ยฉ American Library Association. All rights reserved
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Madeline de Montalia, the perpetually youthful and beautiful vampire, once beloved of the Count Saint-Germain, comes to America in the 1840's to live with and study the native tribes of America, desiring to document their culture and knowledge before these are changed forever and unalterably by cont