The American Heiress In Review

St. Martin's Press provides the opening chapters to anyone who might be interested in their upcoming releases.

As a member of their "Read-It-First" program, I discovered The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin. The first twenty-five pages, delivered to my e-mail inbox in five installments, was enough to pique my interest.

If you are a budding author, struggling to find representation and a publishing contract. DO NOT use this piece of debut fiction as a template for success. Daisy Goodwin is the product of a heavily clouted family, and her novel is by no means a perfect example of what it takes to get published these days.

The premise of the story is nothing new. Certainly Edith Wharton did a fine job building fiction around American heiresses of the late Victorian period, all on the hunt for a titled European husband.

Ms. Goodwin takes such a buccaneer and paints Cora Cash in a sympathetic light, the victim of an overbearing mother looking to add more gilt to the Gilded Age. Then the author fashions a mean girl rival that no good romance can survive without, and sprinkles in some conflict with a beast of a mother-in-law. All the makings of a good story.

What's lacking is the steady hand of an editor, to slice out a character (a milliner's assistant who appears in one chapter and then disappears) that serves no purpose whatsoever. The manuscript would have been well served if an editor had wiped out much of the redundant emotions so that readers wouldn't feel as if they're being beaten over the head with constant reminders of Cora Cash's animosity towards her husband's mother and the nastiness of her arch-nemesis, the scheming Charlotte.

This is the sort of book that I finish and think how glad I am that there's a public library available. I would have been disappointed if I'd spent $25.99 for the novel, but for free, it's not a complete waste of resources.

If you're into historical romance and don't mind cartoonish characters, the book isn't half bad. If you're looking for Edith Wharton-type insight into an era, you've come to the wrong place.