A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers was a bit of a slog for me.  While the characters were interesting, the information provided seemed too thin to merit a book.  The author based it on a villa in the South of Italy but then we moved to England, to France, to Vita & Violet, to an Italian friend, disparate characters, places,  and the book's focus and especially its passion suffered.

"With his oblique anecdotes about Salman Rushdie, and a footnoted reference to one of his wife Margaret Drabble’s novels, Holroyd, too, sometimes gives us his literary-social milieu instead of real emotional involvement" Laura Marsh writes in the online New Review piece below http://www.tnr.com/book/review/michae... and perhaps that is what is missing from the book.  I could not connect.


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