Loving Frank: A Novel
Where to buy Loving Frank: A Novel books online?
Product Description
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine like affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her spouse, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, leader Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic like tale and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves small-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of like and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless like tale.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
“Loving Frank is one of persons novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a tale that unfolds with riveting urgency.”
–Lauren Belfer, leader of City of Light
“This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable tale of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.”
——Scott Turow
“It takes fantastic courage to write a novel about past people, and in particular to give voice to a name as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This perfectly written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s like affair is plain and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton
“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating like tale. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever place.”
–Elizabeth BergAmazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It’s a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving persons truths into a tale that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney’s like tale is–as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted–small-known and regularly dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan’s skillful hands, but, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in like. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it’s their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their tale is. Mamah’s bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her small opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. –Anne Bartholomew
Buy Cheap Loving Frank: A Novel Online
Related posts:
Hi:
Want to review but I never received the book. I have no thought what happened. Perhaps the vendor will let me know where the book is. Thanks.
p.s. this is one of the few times that I have had to give a negative review.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This is a tiresome tale about selfish, self-vital people for whom I felt nothing but contempt. The best part of the book was the end. The book itself deserves the same ending.
I would have rated Loving Frank zero stars, but the form wouldn’t allow it.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Woman has a dull spouse. Woman meets intellectually appealing and exciting married man. Woman leaves spouse for the exciting, talented man. Woman travels through Europe for a year or so with lover but feels “wrenched” that her children are home. She returns, divorces her dull spouse, moves with children into fantastically designed house built by her lover. Dies young in a fire set by madman. Children perish as well. This is fullfillment? Living one’s dreams? Really, what’s the point???
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
My review is not excellent. I ordered this and ten minutes later, cancelled the order asking for a full refund. This was in August and I’m still waiting for my refund.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Judging by all the hype and instant best seller status many readers like me selected this up because of their interest in Wright. Although fiction, I was hoping for more insight into the man but the novel is disappointing in this respect. Well written but over the top in parts, it focuses on Wright’s scandalous affair that ruined his first marriage. Readers interested in getting a richer picture of Wright should try a recent account of his later exploits — The Fellowship: The Untold Tale of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Friedlander and Zellman. Although non fiction, “The Fellowship” is in many ways more fun to read and paints a more plain picture of the man and his followers. The Fellowship: The Untold Tale of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5