The Light Heart

Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable Love Story
Review: I read this book over 25 years ago and loved it. The enduring love story of shy, young Phoebe and strong, handsome soldier Oliver (set in the War years of the early 1900s) has remained strong in my memory all these years.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable Love Story
Review: I read this book over 25 years ago and loved it. The enduring love story of shy, young Phoebe and strong, handsome soldier Oliver (set in the War years of the early 1900s) has remained strong in my memory all these years.

Rating:
Summary: Two Loves Worth Waiting For...
Review: When Phoebe Sprague discovers that love may not mean the bland affection evoked by dependable, familiar, unexciting Miles Day, but rather the effervescent, shameless, delirious passion inspired by the revelation that is Oliver Campion, life enters a maze she never imagined. Endlessly, hopelessly separated by previous entanglements, Phoebe and Oliver weave in and out of each other's lives through peace and into war, touching but never holding in an agony of love denied. Meanwhile Rosalind Norton-Leigh, beautiful, light-hearted and naive, learns what it means to commit her life without love to a man who is a stranger in perspective, in background, and in temperament. These two main stories hang upon the framework provided by the years between the death of Victoria and the start of the First World War. But be forewarned: glorious and enthralling as the stories are, in this as in the final books of this series Ms. Thane's dislike for and contempt of what she perceives to be the "German Character" glare like a discord in a lovely symphony. One must remember that Thane spent all her summers in England between the World Wars, and that these novels were written just before and during the Second, so that her blatant anti-German prejudice becomes at least understandable -- but her verbal decimation of Germans as a nationality and as a culture can be as difficult to take as the casual racism of her earlier novels. Read this book for its virtues -- her description of the sinking of the Lusitania, London during the zeppelin raids, life in a German Schloss before the war, England in Thane's favorite elite trappings. Read it, if for no other reason, than for the embraceable, eye-popping and purely-a-joy character that is long lost cousin Sally Sprague. And read it most of all for the glorious human romances that adorn this scaffolding. If nothing else, this book will make you fall in love all over again with the wild, pulse-pounding idea of being once more (but maybe for the only time) truly in love.

Rating:
Summary: book sequence
Review: While each of Ms Thane's books can be read and enjoyed individually, I think they are best appreciated if one reads them in order: "Dawn's Early Light," "Yankee Stranger," "Ever After," "The Light Heart," "Kissing Kin," "This was Tomorrow," and "Homing." This takes the Day-Sprague clan from the Revolutionary War well into the WWII era.