Heather Rose’s historical novel bends time with a Bridgerton influence

FICTION
A Great Act of Love
Heather Rose
Allen and Unwin, $34.99

Praise be to God. It’s not a dark and stormy night at the opening of Heather Rose’s new novel, but on a hot summer evening, 1836, London. It’s a full moon, and Caroline, responding to her father’s whistle from the sidewalk, runs up the stairs for this unexpected meeting. His demeanor is uneasy, his skin is ashen, and when he reaches for his hand he is cut by a short knife covered in blood. He takes it from her and throws it into the River Thames. He walks into the shadows, and Caroline, a mere girl, retreats into terrible loneliness.

Heather Rose commands the respect of literary award givers, but she also has the distinction of being admired by readers of popular fiction. He is uneasy about his abilities; She writes about and across art, politics, and contemporary families, is a memoirist, and a writer for children and adolescents. A Great Act of Love It’s his sixth novel for adults, but his first historical novel, and he moves forward with masterful gusto.

Melodramatic opening A Great Act of Love, A phased environment detailed with visual cues sets the pace and tone. Expectations increase as the curtain rises, the candlelit stage becomes fixed, and characters enter from behind, from below, and often from across the stage. However. What’s this? What? You lean forward in your seat. The dress and props are all early Victorian, but the characters appear to be twisted time. These carefully dressed people may be dressing according to the formality of the past, but they come from today, 2025. Bridgerton to influence? How brave. And sometimes how sweet.

Within a dozen pages, the years pass by and Caroline takes on a new profession that involves cross-dressing, chess, theft, money, and gender reassignment. He is under the tutelage of his father’s successful sister, Henriette, a woman of both the past and the future. Meanwhile, his father, who killed a woman in a fit of insanity, is also sentenced to death. However, the Crown is not keen on hanging the insane and he is transported to Australia; Here he will spend the rest of his natural life in a gloomy place at the end of the world, on Norfolk Island.

Caroline, now a well-educated woman in her early 20s, sees visions and visions of her father’s childhood as he walks his ancestral vineyards in France – vineyards that once produced France’s most famous champagne. His father is the central love of his life. He understood him, educated him, and gave him knowledge of botany and medicine while working alongside him in his pharmacy business in London. This special education sustains him throughout his life as he embarks on a quest to reunite with his father. Can a young woman imagine herself into another world, another person?

At the age of 23, he boards a ship to America and from there books a passage that he hopes will take him to Van Diemen’s Land. Her disguise is that of a rich young widow; the perfect disguise for a woman whom men instantly admire. But disguise is perhaps a possibility that could become a reality. We all adapt as we go, whether we change or not, in the face of need or danger. On a quest to see her father again, Caroline realizes that she is a woman who must make up a new story every day in order to live.. She, too, is Scheherazade, like the other women who created themselves.

Heather Rose is a masterful Scheherazade, holding together the complexities, a.k.a. chaos, of various lives and organizing them into a generally coherent and generally satisfying whole that is casually referred to as history.