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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Seventh Miss Hatfield by Anna Caltabiano (view source)
Revision as of 11:10, 2 July 2015
, 11:10, 2 July 2015no edit summary
Would you risk your life to stay out of your time with the one you love or harden your heart and return to live forever?
Anna Caltabiano is seventeen. Seventeen! And this is her second novel. Yes, that’s right. She’s basically a child with a writing gift that utterly belies her youth. Now, ''The Seventh Miss Hatfield'' actually wasn’t what I was expecting; I anticipated a tale that would be loaded with time travelling capers and the like – I was thinking a cross between [[The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger]] and [[Doctor Who: 12 Doctors 12 Stories by Malorie Blackman, Holly Black and others|Dr Who]] but in fact it was a rather lovely, gentle and old fashioned love story, set in the days where gentlemen dressed for dinner, butlers buttled and ladies wore gloves and rode side saddle. It was sweet and charming and innocent and to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I was induced to read a PG romance story like this one that also had enough gumption in the tale to keep my attention.
In summary and without wishing to cast a gender-stereotype over its audience, I’d say that ''The Seventh Miss Hatfield'' is your modern day take on a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel; whilst probably not appealing to the blue rinse brigade as such, it isn’t chick lit and it isn’t literary and so I’d say it falls somewhere in between. Miss Hatfield (the seventh one, not the sixth) is certainly likeable; she’s fallible, youthfully exuberant and kind and Henley Beauford is warm and human and you will likely enjoy their interaction as much as I did because there isn’t anything to not like, irrespective of the plethora of negative reviews that I have seen for this book (I definitely think they all forgot the age of the author when they set about shredding the story and the characters in this lovely tale).
