Rachel's Passage

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Summary: wonderful!!!
Review: I loved every word of this book. When I finished reading it I immediately tried to find something else by Paula Reid. I am very selective in choosing my reading material. This one is a definite winner. It was clean and lively and it touched my heart. The characters were real, not out of touch with reality.

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Summary: Rachel's Passage is based on the concept of self-divorce.
Review: I was inspired to write this book when I discovered a fascinating historical circumstance. In the early 19th century, when our forefathers labored with the important business of establishing the first democratic nation the world had ever seen, one of the poorly-documented struggles that ordinary people faced was how to deal with marriages that were unsatisfactory. Since divorce required expensive and hard-won dispensations from both church and state, it was very rare. Much less rare were bad marriages. Drunkenness, cruelty, infidelity all existed, making divorce sometimes a necessity. So society found a way to handle the problem: self-divorce. In some places it was socially acceptable for unhappy couples to divorce themselves by simply announcing in public that they both agreed the marriage should end. They could then even remarry. However, the solution didn't always work. I discovered an actual legal case in which one party to a self-divorce changed his mind after eleven years and sued his happily remarried ex- wife (and now mother of two) for adultery (called "criminal conversation" back then) - and won! My novel - I call it an Intimate Historical - concerns a self-divorce: the heartbreaking reasons for its instigation, the dramatic complications that ensued, and the suit for adultery that climaxed the affair. Though my characters and their "criminal conversation" are completely fictional, the strange legal and historical background is absolutely true.

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Summary: A fascinating story
Review: In sections alternating between the main characters' perspectives, this beautifully written historical novel lures readers to take sides, and then doubt the side they've taken, in a lawsuit over the custody of a child. The author's thorough research into archaic legal concepts like "self divorce" and "criminal conversation" gives her fictional early American community a solid structure. Sure, it's a romantic story, but the characters are so well depicted and their controversy so sensibly drawn, that the intrigue of the book goes far beyond the simple categorization of its genre.

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Summary: Stunning - Paula Reid is magnificent
Review: Rachel's Passage is a wonderful story of a woman who has been charged with "criminal conversation" aka adultery. I loved the way Reid varied between first person and third person narrative. I hope the author plans on writing more books like this, with similar settings.

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Summary: Nominated for Romantic Times Best American Historical
Review: Rachel's Passage, by Paula Reid has been nomintated by the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best American Historical Romance for 1998. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

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Summary: Entertaining and thought provoking
Review: This book was a recent selection of my book group. It provoked an interesting discussion of women's rights in regards to divorce and custody and how those rights have changed over the years. A search in my library's card catalog turned up several other books written by the author under the name of Elizabeth Mansfield and Paula Jonas. I especially enjoyed "To Spite the Devil."