The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson looks at the months leading up to the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, starting with the gallantry of Southern life (for the ruling class only) and the election of Lincoln, which agitated slave owners who assumed he would challenge their way of life and their prosperity.  As revealed in this narrative, the months leading to the attack on Sumter seem like a train careening off the tracks but with many moments when it seems someone should have been able to stop it.

The Eights by Joanna Miller – 3/20 Books of Summer

In this debut historical novel, which begins in October 1920, four very different young women arrive at Oxford to be part of the first female class actually allowed to matriculate. Brilliant but awkward Beatrice has always been in the shadow of her suffragette mother and yearns for friends; shy Marianne, only child of a poor minister, already wishes she hadn't come, for complicated reasons; 

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch – Reading Ireland Month 2025

After Eilish Stack answers the door one night to find two policemen asking for her husband, she slowly begins to realize nothing will be the same for her family. Her husband’s job seems innocuous – he is an administrator for the Teachers’ Union of Ireland but these men are investigating an allegation against him:

The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin

Title: The American Heiress

Author:  Daisy Goodwin

Publication: St. Martin’s, paperback, 2010

Genre: Historical Fiction

The American Heiress is the ninth of twelve books that are part of my 2019 TBR Challenge, inspired by Adam at Roof Beam Reader, to prioritize some of my unread piles.  I have another one read but not yet reviewed and two more to read by December 31st.  Can she do it?

Plot: Cora Cash is the beautiful daughter of an affluent and ambitious mother, who wants English nobility for a son-in-law.  Following a glamorous (although marred by a fire) ball in Newport, Cora leaves behind her local admirers and heads to England with her mother and her shrewd black maid, Bertha.  Conveniently, Cora immediately encounters a very eligible bachelor, the Duke of Wareham, who is high on pedigree but low on cash, and unenthusiastically recognizes an opportunity when he sees one.  The reader, if not Cora, anticipates the obstacles in the way of turning a marriage of convenience into a relatively happy union (condescending servants, jilted lovers, shrewish mother-in-law, poor heating) but there is more to Cora than desire for status.   Cora slowly learns how to defend herself and begins to figure out what she needs to do to master her new position, act befitting a duchess, and cope with her moody husband in what turns out to be an entertaining novel. 

American Heiress by ?

Quelle coïncidence!   I found myself reading three books with the same title!  This is Book Serendipity!

The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin has been on my TBR pile for quite a while.  In fact, it is part of my Roof Beam Reader Challenge and I plan to read it in the next several weeks.  It is about a Newport heiress (think Consuelo Vanderbilt or Lady Grantham) brought to England by her mother to marry into the aristocracy at the end of the 19th century.

The other two came from the library.  The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden, set slightly later, is also about a rich young American woman destined to marry an English lord - until she sets sail on the Lusitania in 1916.  Clemency does not survive but her maid does, and begins an impersonation that will change her life - if she survives.    I may have read this in my teens but that didn't stop me from devouring the entire book in an evening earlier this week!

Finally, my classmate Jeff Toobin's book, American Heiress, about Patty Hearst was chosen by my book group this month.  I will have to hustle to finish this before the Reading Group meets on October 2nd!

By the way, you cannot copyright a title. . .