Book Review : Heiress by Susan May Warren

Title: Heiress 
Author: Susan May Warren

This was a very good book, one that showed how getting what you think you want isn’t always what you really do want. Esme has everything that her sister Jinx wants. She is older, is allowed to go to the high class parties and has men practically throwing themselves at her. But Esme wants none of it, she wants to be empowered, be her own person and be a journalist to help those less fortunate than herself. Through Jinxs’ jealousy everything goes wrong for the sisters, they both end up farther away from what they both really want and need. Jinx ends up with a husband who doesn’t love or respect her, and Esme runs away thinking she has lost her love and her family. Fast forward some 20 odd years and one sister is in an awful place, she has a husband and 2 children but her life is a complete wreck. The other sister is a widow out west with a young daughter and has fulfilled her dream to be a journalist,. Though they have no contact with each other at all, until tragedy strikes back east and Esme runs back to help her sister. In the end both sisters do come out ahead, but each also pays a pretty high price.

I think that for these two sisters, if Jinx would have been the elder and Esme the younger than so much heart ache could have been avoided for them both. Since they lived at a time when the older daughter had to be the first to be admitted to society and wed before the younger.  Also women couldn’t really have jobs and be respectable, so if Esme was born at a later date her desire to be a journalist wouldn’t have been so taboo and forbidden to her.

Most of the main characters are all likable and the story is pretty fast moving. You can not help getting caught up with the characters, and feeling their pain with them. While there was so much excess for their family, it had so many strings attached to it that for Esme she made the right choice to walk away and be her own person. I wish Jinx could have been a stronger more self reliant person and could have walked away from her husband once she realized how bad her marriage was, but she was so attached to her lifestyle that was not something she could muster the strength to do.

I really did enjoy this book, and look forward to the next Daughters of Fortune book when it comes out.

About the book: Heiress

They can buy anything they want—fame, power, beauty, even loyalty.

But they can’t buy love.

The beautiful and wealthy heiress daughters of August Price can buy everything their hearts desire. But what if their desire is to be loved, without an enormous price tag attached? When one sister betrays another for the sake of love, will she find happiness? And what happens when the other sets out across the still untamed frontier to find it—will she discover she’s left it behind in the glamorous world of the New York gilded society? What price will each woman pay for being an heiress?

Set in the opulent world of the Gilded Age, two women discover that being an heiress just might cost them everything they love.

Read an excerpt here.

About Susan: Susan May Warren is an award-winning, best-selling author of over twenty-five novels, many of which have won the Inspirational Readers Choice Award, the ACFW Book of the Year award, the Rita Award, and have been Christy finalists. After serving as a missionary for eight years in Russia, Susan returned home to a small town on Minnesota’s beautiful Lake Superior shore where she, her four children, and her husband are active in their local church.

Susan’s larger than life characters and layered plots have won her acclaim with readers and reviewers alike. A seasoned women’s events and retreats speaker, she’s a popular writing teacher at conferences around the nation and the author of the beginning writer’s workbook: From the Inside-Out: discover, create and publish the novel in you!. She is also the founder of www.MyBookTherapy.com, a story-crafting service that helps authors discover their voice.

Susan makes her home in northern Minnesota, where she is busy cheering on her two sons in football, and her daughter in local theater productions (and desperately missing her college-age son!)

A full listing of her titles, reviews and awards can be found at:www.susanmaywarren.com.

Link to buy the book