From Publishers Weekly
Saxton ( Family Feeling ) here presents another memorable saga of love, loss and reunion. David Thomas, the last in a line of wealthy Welsh shipbuilders on the River Dee, is one of a group of British engineers gaining valuable experience working on projects in post-Revolutionary Russia. On a hiking vacation in the Caucasus, he meets Pavel Fedorovna (named after her uncle), who lives with her sister Eva on their foster parents' farm. David and Pavel plan to marry but agree to wait a yeara sensible decision that is brought to naught by the machinations of fate and the communist government. The British engineers become personae non grata; Pavel's parents are transported to a labor camp and their farm redistributed to peasants from the plains who have no idea how to run a mountain farm; and the sisters are separated. How David and Pavel are eventually reunited and the intervening events form the main thread of this generously detailed novel underscored by descriptions of the sisters' early life in the Caucasus mountains among Muslim peasants, the events that led them to their foster parents and a series of mysterious murders after the foster family is split up. This novel is evocative in many ways of Dr. Zhivago ; it is a potent love story set in the same period of civil turmoil that caused families to be destroyed and divided. As in her previous novel, Saxton's descriptions of landscape are lyrical and accurate, a bonus to her crafty storytelling.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
When her peasant family is shot by soldiers, Pavel and her sister, Eva, are raised by kulaks, who later are shipped off to a labor camp under Stalin. Meanwhile, in England, the shipyard business of David's family founders and he is forced to take work in Russia. There Pavel and David meet, fall in love, and are parted; eventually, they marry others. But fate, sweeping across Russia and England and lasting years and years and pages and pages, reunites them after time and effort (mostly theirs, but also the reader's). This Pasternak/Delderfield-type saga bears none of the style, character, or plot of either, but will perhaps entertain undemanding readers of the romance-cum-history-epic genre. For popular fiction collections with ample funds. Ann Donovan, Central Washington Univ. Lib., Ellensburg
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
