The Glittering Hour

The romance see-sawing at the axis of Iona Grey's The Glittering Hour easily could have been weighed in the wrong direction by its cliched premise: poor boy meets rich girl, and a star-crossed affair ensues outside the stuffy parlors of 1920s-era London. Yet the novel escapes stereotype oversaturation through its delicate prose and tender treatment of passion. As nine-year-old Alice Carew languishes in the nursery of her family's frigid estate, she awaits letters from her mother in Burma, where her father is supposedly conducting business. But Selina, Alice's mother, has a story to share, and each of her letters nudges Alice along a treasure hunt, one that promises to remove the shroud over her past.

Interwoven throughout Alice's plodding days are flashbacks to Selina's youth in London, where she was a "Bright Young Thing," gossip columnists' favorite source for scandal. Her predilection for champagne-soaked evenings racing through London with her wealthy friends lands her at the door of Lawrence Weston, a poor painter who falls for her almost instantaneously. The two engage in a brief but breathtaking romance, an especially interesting and enjoyable section of the novel, before reality arrives to rip them apart. The reasons for their separation prove oversimplified, yet the heart of their story remains intact as Alice discovers her own identity and, in the process, learns her mother's fate. Grey (Letters to the Lost) proves that, above all, she understands how to write a love story that survives after it shatters, one that manages to outlive its own ticking clock. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer