THE GLITTERING HOUR

by Iona Grey

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Blackwood Park was full of ghosts. Its empty corridors echoed with the whispers of lost voices and snatches of old laughter. It was a house where the past felt more vivid than the present, which was nothing more than a stretch of endless days fading into uniform blankness.

 

… there was a bowl of paperwhite daffodils on the table by her armchair. Their delicate perfume was fresh in a room that smelled of stopped clocks and old paper.

 

I resented the rules and restrictions and the rigidness … The hypocrisy and control… Their favourite punishment was to withhold food, and I resented being sent to bed hungry while downstairs seven courses were being served in the dining room and people were only picking at each of them. And the more resentful I was the naughtier I became and the more I was punished… I spent my childhood feeling permanently ravenous.

 

Don’t you be shy about ringing the bell or going down to find her if it doesn’t appear –she’s got a head like a sieve, that one. Not that I imagine she’ll have much time for daydreaming today. Miss Lovelock’s had her up and down like a fiddler’s elbow already this morning, fetching tea and toast and hot water cans and whatnot.

 

‘Someone once told me that a woman’s body is like a piano. It’s up to the man whether he chooses to pick out a nursery rhyme with one finger, or learn how to play a symphony. I suppose that was the first movement’… ‘I’m terribly ignorant about culture,’ she whispered. ‘Remind me – how many movements are there in a symphony?’

 

Secrets and half-truths seemed to swirl through the corridors on icy currents of air.

 

 My Review:

 

This was a feast of a book. The Glittering Hour was thoughtfully written and cunningly insightful as well as shrewdly observant. It was a slowly evolving and highly emotive story that was skillfully crafted and elegantly told, and I absorbed it as if it were being injected straight into my gray matter while vivid imagery flickered behind my eyes. There were four-hundred-eighty beautifully written pages and I read them ever so slowly as I wanted to savor each perfectly chosen word, even though the storylines turned me inside out, stung my eyes, pinched my heart, and put hot rocks in my throat. Iona Grey is found treasure and a new addition at the very top of my list of favorite authors.