The Stolen Marriage by Diane Chamberlain: A Review

Chamberlain's The Stolen Marriage has a lot going for it but it could be slow getting there, at times.  Tess DeMello will soon wed her childhood best friend, Vincent, when she decides to take a trip to Washington, DC with one of her friends.  There, she meets a wealthy furniture salesman from Hickory, North Carolina named Henry.  After an evening of too much drinking, Henry gets Tess pregnant.  Shamed by her strong Catholic faith and fearing that her fiancée will not accept her, she travels to North Carolina to ask for financial help from Henry.  He proposes that she marry him instead of raising the child alone.  She agrees but she soon finds that Henry, and her new in-laws, keep a lot of secrets from her.

This book has a lot of things going on.  There is the end of World War II, the polio epidemic and race relations in the American South.  While all of these make for great background stories, there were too many moving parts in this book.  It felt like an imitation of Forrest Gump.  The story could move a bit slow, at times, too.  The ending paid off but I wish that the author had gotten there a bit quicker.  I also wish there was more about Hickory, North Carolina in this book.  One thing that I love about southern fiction is the way that the author is so often able to describe southern life so vividly that you feel as if you are there, living in that city, in that time period.  But I live less than three hours from Hickory and even I didn't feel connected to it.  I grew up in the DC area and I did not feel any connection to Baltimore girl, Tess.  The place and time that Chamberlain described felt unrealistic and... just off.

My complaints about the time and place setting aside, this was an enjoyable book.  Tess DeMello was a likeable character.  Actually, all of the characters were likeable.  There were no true villains in this novel, which was very different.  While Tess's mother-in-law, Ruth, could be cold-hearted and greedy, reasons for her actions were obvious.  Henry's sister, Lucy, seemed, at first, to be meaner than Ruth but she was revealed to have a soft heart, in the end. There really wasn't anybody in this book to hate.  This may be agreeable to some readers and disagreeable to others.  I believed that this book was a mystery when I read about it but it really was more in the category of women's fiction or historical fiction.  I think readers who enjoy historical fiction with a lot going on, where the author does not settle on one important historical topic, would enjoy this book.  


My rating:
★★★☆☆

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