Anne Robins, A Perfect Stranger

A Perfect Stranger

Anne Robins

Zebra, Jul 2004

ISBN: 0821776991

In 1912, panic is rampant as the mighty Titanic begins sinking into the sea. Wealthy American Loretta Linden tries to help Isabel Golightly and her six-year-old daughter Eunice gets into a lifeboat, but it took a handsome stranger to get the females safely off the doomed vessel. The three women manage to reach New York while the casualty list grows everyday and the dead exceeds the available coffins. Isobel wonders if that kind stranger died rescuing others.

Miss Linden takes Isabel and Eunice to San Francisco with her when they meet their rescuer Somerset Fitzroy. As Isabel struggles to adapt to the modern American world that her kind patron provides for her, the precocious and intelligent Eunice loves the new environs. Meanwhile Somerset begins courting Isabel, but she wants him to remain a friend while he wants a family with her, her daughter, and future Fitzroys.

This engaging historical romance provides insight to readers at a momentous time when the suffragette's movement is taken hold with simple changes in women's lifestyle. Readers will get a taste of a technological boom with new gizmos like telephones and cars, etc changing the way people communicate and relate. The characters are well written as the difference between mother and daughter show the generational chasm. Although the romance is fun to follow that plot takes a back seat to the marvel of pre World War I America.

Harriet Klausner