Customer Reviews

Crane's Morning

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This novel is a rather famously plagiarized version of Elizabeth Goudge's "The Rosemary Tree", and I'm surprised that this is not mentioned anywhere in the description of the book. The case was rather notorious and ended with the apparent suicide of this author once the truth had come out. At any rate, if you enjoyed this book, give credit to the original delightful novel by Elizabeth Goudge, and seek out her other works which are just as good.

I read this book when it first came out, and immediately recognized that the characters and plot were not original, but stolen. Others did as well, and it didn't take long for the truth to come out:

"Crane's Morning" is one of the most infamous examples of plagiarism in existence. The entire plot, as well as huge chunks of exact, word-for-word dialog and description, were copied from "The Rosemary Tree" by Elizabeth Goudge. All that the "author" did was move the setting from England to India.
The book was withdrawn from publication, and all unsold copies returned to the publisher, when the theft was discovered.

Crane's Morning is more than the sum of its elegant and well-crafted parts. This book explores the experience of the human condition - purity, bitterness, folly, redemption. Underlying everything is a sense of the eternal and intricate order/disorder of life.