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Summary
Summary
2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist (top 100 out of 10,000 entries, General Fiction Category)
""This is a premise that will draw people in and it's very interesting. The characters are likable and it gets right to the action... The combination of history and time travel and engaging dialogue in an upbeat style has whetted my appetite to read more."" - Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Expert Reviewer
Former history professor John Curry has been recruited by a time-travel company to scout the best vantage point for clients to witness the inauguration of the first President of the United States. There's just one problem: When he arrives in 1789, there is no inauguration-and no United States. Until this point, the time-travel job has had its perks. Getting relationship advice from the legendary lover, Casanova, was valuable. Accompanying Casanova to the opening night of Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, was even better.
But being stranded in the British Colony of New York isn't what he signed up for. Few people have even heard of George Washington, and the short-lived American Revolution failed-presumably because Washington wasn't alive to lead it. John always knew history could change on a dime, but not after it already happened. Right?
After learning Washington was killed thirty years earlier during the French and Indian War, John realizes the only way he can return home is to ensure there's a United States to return to. Everything hinges on keeping Washington alive-not the easiest task protecting someone famous for leading battles on the front lines while perched on a horse. While traveling further back through time to protect Washington, he uncovers a secret the Freemasons have kept for more than two and a half centuries and learns that the history he thought he knew was completely wrong.
Author Notes
Jojo Moyes was born in London, England on August 4, 1969. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University. In 1992, she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years in various roles including assistant news editor and arts and media correspondent.
Her first book, Sheltering Rain, was published in 2002. Her other works include Me Before You, One Plus One, The Girl You Left Behind, Silver Bay, The Ship of Brides, Honeymoon in Paris, After You, Windfallen, Paris for One and Other Stories, and The Horse Dancer. She won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter from Your Lover.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Loosely based on the story of her own grandparents, Sheltering Rain is the impressive debut of U.K. author Jojo Moyes. Joy and her husband, edward, meet during coronation festivities in Hong Kong in 1953. Forty years later, they are living on a ramshackle Irish estate, where edward's health is rapidly declining. Their spunky granddaughter Sabine arrives and is at first miserable in the grim surroundings. Weeks later, she is followed by her flighty mother, Kate, from whom Joy has been estranged for years. There are plenty of fireworks among the three and the strong supporting cast as old secrets come to the surface in this absorbing family drama. National advertising. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Tempestuous mother-daughter relationships, with their psychologically rich undertones of repressed jealousy, transparent contempt, and perceived disapproval, form the crux of Moyes' accomplished debut novel. Set in a remote Irish village, and mining the popular "my mother never understood me" genre with a potent and provocative tale of three generations of Ballantyne women, Moyes' tale reveals with empathic sensitivity the heavy emotional baggage burdening each woman. There's Sabine, a headstrong, petulant, and typically resentful teenager, perpetually at odds with her mother, Kate, a thirtysomething woman whose self-image is measured by a string of disastrous love affairs, and who is troubled by an equally strained relationship with her own mother, Joy, the matriarch whose rigid reserve safeguards painful personal and family secrets. Comparisons to Maeve Binchy and Rosamunde Pilcher will be inevitable and not altogether undeserved, and in style and substance Moyes is a worthy addition to their ranks. Fluidly paced and cast with engaging characters, Moyes' book offers escapist entertainment in the best tradition of those masters of British Isles domestic fiction. Carol Haggas
Library Journal Review
Touchy relationships among several generations of mothers and daughters mark this first novel by British journalist Moyes. Chapters alternate between the early days of Joy and Edward Ballayntyne's marriage in Hong Kong and their present-day struggles with London-based daughter Kate and granddaughter Sabine. At 15, Sabine despises her single mother, whose frequent change of boyfriends keeps their household in flux. While Kate irons out her latest man problem, she sends Sabine to live on the family estate in Ireland with her estranged parents, whose passion is horse breeding. Grandmother is coldly stern, and grandfather is ancient and bedridden. Their employee, Thom, teaches Sabine to ride horses, a pastime that thaws the teenager's sullenness. When Kate visits Ireland for the first time since she fled ten years earlier, she is amazed to find her daughter not only happily tending horses but also her difficult grandparents. But while things may be healing on the home front, Kate's romantic life is still turbulent: she encounters an old flame from her younger days on the estate, which reopens old wounds. The Irish setting and warmly described family relationships will appeal to fans of Maeve Binchy. Recommended. Carol J. Bissett, New Braunfels P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.