Morningquest
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'Eccentric and poignant with inevitable echoes of Austen as she goes for heightened emotion and rarefied beauty . . . suspend disbelief and you’ll fly through this world of sense and sensibility' Time Out
Aspiring young artist sixteen-year-old Pandora Crumbe, lonely and bored in her rural village, has been unwillingly taken for lunch with her eccentric neighbours The Morningquest family . . . when her mother dies suddenly at the table.
The Morninquests take Pandora under their wing – Sir Gilbert is a world famous conductor with an elegant wife and seven eccentric children, all highly talented in their own way. Pandora flourishes in their rambling country home and relishes the cultured and bohemian company. As her life moves with theirs to 60’s London, a Northern University, and finally to communist Prague, she uncovers scandals, tragedy, her own mother’s secrets, and finally the way to realise her own dreams.
From award winning author Joan Aiken, romantic suspense novel Morningquest is an intense and kaleidoscopic read, an epic rite of passage with a vast cast of exuberant characters who sweep you into their world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The prolific and talented Aiken ( The Haunting of Lamb House ) falters with this heavy-handed novel. Pandora Crumbe is 16 when her mother brings her to Boxall Hill to call on the Morningquests, the famous, prodigiously talented family that has invited much speculation by the residents of the English country village of Floxby Crucis. She has barely mastered everyone's names when her mother suffers a fatal heart attack, whereupon the Morningquests offer Pandora their help in everything from funeral arrangements to college tuition. Pandora's enduring fascination with the Morningquests battens on their eccentricities and accomplishments (the seven children have published a successful novel, for example) as well as on the obvious puzzles. How had her taciturn mother, the wife of the village veterinarian, become so intimate with Lady Morningquest, a world-class musician? What lies beneath the brothers' and sisters' various alliances and silences? Aiken's revelations seem formulaic, and her narrative suffers from abrupt, disconcerting changes in point of view. Pandora grows into a glamorous painter and equally dramatic destinies claim each of the Morningquests, but every development is so exaggerated as to stagger, not stimulate, the reader.
