Malcolm Ross-MacDonald

I don't think we ever actually used this as our go to book flaker explaining sex to the kids. In fact, I think they were way ahead of us when it came to that stage. But it seems that this is the basic aim of this book.......though it's a bit more complicated than that and presents an evolutionary approach to the whole issue of the origin of humans. I think it's too complex as a sex instructor .....takes too long to get to the point. And maybe too complex if one is trying to talk about the origin of dinosaurs etc. Anyway, at this stage it's all water under the bridge. Some nice picture-diagrams, Interesting but maybe not great. But I'm now in the position of having to downsize my library and this book is one of the casualties. Pity but I won't be using it in the future. I give it three stars.… (altro)

This book is the last in a four novel series of the Stevenson family. The novel tells the story of Abigail Stevenson, a very different woman of her time, interested in being a famous writer, finds herself immersed in the more sordid, but fascinating part of life, including sex, money and greed. A very passionate story of a women who knows what she wants even if it is not the proper thing to do. Malcom Macdonald is a wonderful storyteller and depicts an era that was not all prim and proper. This tale gives us an idea into the early world of writing, publishing and women's rights. Abigail and Annie are both very strong and enigmatic women in a time when women virtually had no say. A wonderful conclusion to this engrossing family saga.… (altro)

Quick Summary: Beginning in 1839 at the beginning of the Victorian era, the story involves an ambitious man, John Stevenson, and the shrewd, equally ambitious Nora Telling. Together they take over a working mill and the building of a railway tunnel in Northern England. With their friends Walter and Arabella Thornton, they create their own dynasty.

While a well-written novel, there were moments where I became bogged down. The descriptions of the building of the Summit Tunnel between Manchester and Leeds were tedious at best, and I feel only to be appreciated with those with an engineering background. I did appreciate MacDonald's attention to details, I merely did not care so much to observe the laying of every brick. Call me a Philistine.

MacDonald brings to the page the ugliness of poverty, the sweat and grime of hard work, the ruthlessness of ambition. John Stevenson, while an observant, good-hearted man, will not allow his emotions to override good sense. Upon meeting a starving family, he offers the father work, but no charity. John's reasoning is that employment is the way out of starvation and the many privations that go along with poverty.

Nora is much of the same mind. Upon witnessing the plight of a beggar child, she states that if charity were done away with altogether, the evil of children begging would be done away with entirely. When John argues that children would die then, Nora pragmatically declares that they'd die anyway. It's not heartlessness on Nora's part. Nora is a realist, coming from a world rife with poverty, incest, and the death of her own small siblings. For her there was no tender upbringing. She was not sheltered from the ugliness of life.

Which calls to question why she is friends with Arabella Thornton, a prim, proper lady from a middle-class background. Pious to the point of absurdity at times, she is the very example of how virtue can be ones downfall. Though kind, she is prideful, arrogant, and class conscious. Her initial meeting with John is witness to this, when she tries several times to put him in his place as a man of lower caste. Instead, he puts her firmly in her place, with the idea that the world is not so cut and dry as she once believed. This makes her uncomfortable with John for some time, but eventually she comes to admire him greatly for his nobility and strength, those often associated with the upper classes.

This brings us to Walter Thornton, her husband, of the upper classes but with absolutely no backbone. John and Nora mock his many weaknesses. His main weakness, however, seems to be a sexual addiction, and Walter has a hard time coming to terms with Arabella's frigidity. Marital relations with Arabella he finds greatly disappointing, and he both respects her and despises her for her coldness. Upon seeing her in her Christmas dress of pale blue,calm and cool, he thinks in admiring terms of how like an iceberg she looks. This could go in many different ways, but it seems that sex is never far from Walter's mind. He creates scenarios in his mind to make up for the lack of excitement. In one instance, Walter pretends that he's having sex with a corpse while making love to Arabella. We witness Walter's degeneration until the close of the novel, where Walter is left in a pathetic state, weeping and syphilitic. Through Walter we see what vice can bring to the weak-willed.

Bawdy at times, heartbreaking at others, this novel is rich and broad and would please both the romance reader and those interested in good historical fiction.… (altro)