Amazon.com Review
Like a Victorian lady daintily lifting her skirts over a mud puddle, Amy Ephron pays a visit to the Cuban revolution of the 1890s. In
A Cup of Tea, Ephron created a species of historical fiction that combined the coolly modern with the lushly romantic. She returns to form in
White Rose, telling the partially true story of Evangelina Cisneros, a beautiful, spirited teenager who's been imprisoned for her part in the movement to free Cuba from Spanish rule. Karl Decker is a reporter for the New York
Journal--a newspaper whose all-too-appropriate motto is "While others talk... 'The Journal' acts." William Randolph Hearst sends Decker on a secret mission to rescue the girl. The plan is to import her to the States as "a symbol of her country's struggle, the flower of Cuba." Hearst wants to redirect U.S. policy, encouraging greater American support for the revolutionaries and perhaps even an annexation of Cuba. Leaving behind a wife and child in Washington, Decker heads to Havana to plot a daring rescue. He succeeds in freeing Evangelina, and the two fall in love at the very moment she climbs into his arms from her jail cell. "He held her to him for a moment, he felt her breath on his shoulder, her rapid heart beat against his chest." But Ephron's lovers find themselves star-crossed, as lovers will. The second half of the novel is devoted to the political and marital fall-out of their union. Along the way, the author makes free with grammar and punctuation, opening up her sentences in a lazy, tropical way which will seem poetic to some and annoying to others. To wit: "There was a rope tied to a willow tree in the garden as if a child had used it for a swing and the night jasmine blooming fresh in the air."
--Claire Dederer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The latest effort from novelist (A Cup of Tea) and screenwriter Ephron is based on the true story of Evangelina Cisneros, who escaped imprisonment in Cuba with the aid of American journalist Charles Duval (aka Karl Decker) during the 1890s, just before the Spanish-American War. The determined, pretty 19-year-old chose to accompany her father to the Isle of Pines after he was arrested by the Spanish government on political charges. When her father escaped, Evangelina was left to face 20 years in Ceuta, an African penal colony no prisoner had ever survived. William Randolph Hearst sent Decker, his top reporter, to rescue Evangelina; like a modern heroine, she rescued him right back, helping him to make it safely off the island and following him to the U.S., where she met with President McKinley. The attraction between Karl and Evangelina may or may not have roots in fact, but as Ephron tells it, Karl gives scant consideration to his wife and child at home in Washington, D.C. This is an intriguing story and an important one, with special appeal for political and feminist audiences, but Ephron fails to bring it fully to life. Her decision to rely on Evangelina's own words for some of the dialogue ensures the proper historic tone and surely posed an interesting challenge for the writer, but the results are sometimes stilted, though Ephron's own prose is supple. The novel is fleshed out with a good deal of Cuban history and a look at early American cultural imperialism. But it is developed in too sketchy a fashion to involve the reader's emotions; this is all the more disappointing since the subject matter is so promising. (Sept.) FYI: Ephron is writing the screenplay and will be executive producer for a film based on this book that has been optioned by Warner Brothers.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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