| Date: 06 June 2011, 01:13
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I first read Moonraker's Bride when it appeared in the U.S. in 1973. It haunted me. I was very, very happy to find a copy through Amazon last year and found myself re-reading it again this weekend. Madeleine Brent's books all share a common theme of young women who grow up in exotic and difficult circumstances only to be brought into English society. They are timeless, with good plots, great characters, insight into distant times and places, and sense of modesty that fits in well with the regency era. This is the second novel by this author, and is the best of the author's well-done books in my opinion.
From the moment I first met Lucy Waring in a Chinese Christian mission struggling to find an alternative to stealing to feed the 15 girl-children in her care, I couldn't put this book down. Brent's descriptions of life in turn-of-the century China before and during the Boxer Rebellion, the lives of American and European exiles, the outsider's view of English gentry life are compelling. But it is a host of extremely interesting people that I wanted to know better from the first description that draws me in each time: Dr. Langdon (why did he leave America?), Miss Victoria Prothero and her dedication to the Chinese mission after terrible tragedy, the two rival Englishmen who show up in Chengfu with a haunting riddle, the local people and their customs that seem so strange to modern western eyes. These are contrasted with English country society - the Greshams and their snobbish views, Marsh the butler who takes Lucy under his wing and trains her in society; the artistic Falcons and young Matthew, the little boy next boy. But it is Lucy Waring herself that keeps me turning pages in a book that I have now read countless times.
Lucy describes herself at 17 as having "freakish white skin, ugly round eyes, and huge feet". A foreign-devil girl who has grown up in a society that values only males, worships ancestors and hates foreigners. She contemplates selling the older girls as concubines yet her conscience places bad marks in the Recording Angel's book when she must lie to a bed-ridden Miss Prothero about their lack of money and her plans to acquire it. Imminently practical, she is a mixture of Chinese thinking and training by an English spinster. Meticulously following the rules set down by Miss Prothero she has no reference for why many of them are important.
The plot twists and turns are discovered with every page. But you stay with the novel for the characters: Lucy Waring, Nicholas Sabine, Robert Falcon, Edmund Gresham, young Matthew, Marsh, Dr. Langston, Miss Prothero Yu-lan, the Fenshaws, and the children of the Mission.
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