The Husband List

 Shirley J.    Adult Fiction        American Heiresses in the Gilded Age (1894)   English titles

The Husband List by Janet Evanovich and Dorien Kelly    309 pages

I really love Janet Evanovich's style of writing and the detail to which she and Dorien Kelly bring the reader to really feel the lifestyles of the privileged elite in American society in 1894 and how daughters were flaunted to English minor titled nobility to get the prestige of a title for their heiress daughters.   It was pretty much a pimping situation and mothers and fathers often turned a blind eye to what was actually transpiring in order to get the benefit of a titled lord within their family for bragging rights.    Love was never a part of the bargain it was all transacted as any business deal of the time within the upper 2%.   Fortunately, Caroline Maxwell has run off every suitor her mother has tried to snag for her.  But when broke, gambling debt ridden, English Lord Bremerton comes to call, Caroline has met her match in someone who wants her family fortune more than she wants to be shed of him.   Good story.   I would recommend this one to mature gradeschoolers on up.

Cartier's Hope

Cartier's Hope  by M.J.Rose  336 pages

M. J. Rose has written twenty previous novels, and this one may be her best one yet. This time she takes us back to 1910 -1911 New York and the Gilded Age. She writes about the Suffrage Movement, pay equality, treatment equality, betrayal, undercover journalism and the world’s most famous, and most cursed, diamond, the Hope Diamond. Plus a little romance is thrown in for good measure.

Although the Hope Diamond now resides in National Gem and Mineral Collection at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D. C., it was originally housed at New York’s Cartier Jewelry Story in New York. I’ve seen in on display, and it is stunning. I can’t imagine wearing it, much less owning it. Last time I checked the gem was valued at $350 million.

But I digress. While this novel revolves around the Hope, it is a story of one a courageous young women, Vera Garland, who turns her nose up at the high society into which she was born, much to her mother’s chagrin. She wants to make a difference in the world, and she has dedicated her life to trying to right some of the worlds’ wrongs by becoming a journalist.

Writing under the pen name of Vee Swann, Vera has disguised her natural beauty and taken an apartment in the less-than-wealthy area, not all that far from where her family currently resides. Vera/Vee is taking a break. While writing a story, she became attached to one of the people she was writing about and it ended tragically.  She is also reeling from the recent deaths of her beloved Uncle Percy, her mother’s brother, and her adored father, the only person who truly understood her and encouraged her to follow her dreams.

Holed up in her late father’s penthouse high above the store he founded, Vera/Vee is nursing her wounds. In the library, she discovers her father’s deepest secret. I can’t say much more, but Vera believes her father to have been blackmailed.  She plans to get her revenge by using the one thing all of New York is talking about: the Hope Diamond.

The only complaint I have about this intriguing and captivating novel is that, sometimes, when author Rose was providing backstory on the diamond, it was a little much. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Therefore,  “Cartier’s Hope” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.