Blessing in Disguise

Blessing in Disguise

While writing a biography of her senator father, Grace Truscott raises disturbing questions about the murder of Ned Emory, the husband of her father's Black secretary, grapples with her family's troubled past, and copes with the difficulties of a new love Grace Truscott's shocking revelations in her biography of her Southern senator father rock her family and, indeed, Georgia to its very foundations. The truth about his affair with his black secretary and the existence of their daughter jolts the community, derailing Cordelia Truscott's efforts to raise money for her husband's memorial library. Evidently, racism is alive and well in Blessing, Georgia; pillars of the community struggle to come to grips with the difference between reality and social rhetoric, and both Grace and her mother are forced to decide between true love and social conventions. In the tradition of the South's strongest popular fiction, Goudge (Such Devoted Sisters, Viking, 1992) has crafted a poignant and bittersweet story of love and enduring family truths. Readers of Anne Rivers Siddons and Rosamond Pilcher will not be able to put it down. Highly recommended. --Susan Clifford, Hughes Aircraft Co. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Grace Truscott, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer working on the story of a famous civil rights activist, Senator Eugene Truscott, discovers that he was unfaithful long ago to his devoted, high-society southern wife and had a daughter with his black secretary. The news is particularly startling to Grace, since she is the senator's legitimate daughter. And she knows that if she includes such facts in her biography, her mother will be overwhelmed and the plan to build a memorial library in the senator's honor will be jeopardized. These shocking elements make up only the surface of Goudge's story, for Grace is also a divorced mother who is caught in a custody struggle for her teenage son and who is in love with her editor, whose children do not accept her. The romantic and family entanglements in the novel make the decisions about shocking secrets more understandable and ultimately more intense (as Grace's estranged husband tries to use the situation to winnow his way back into his ex-wife's life). Endowed with panache and a convincing story line, Goudge's newest fiction will certainly not disappoint her fans. Denise Perry Donavin Goudge (Such Devoted Sisters, 1992, etc.) delivers a tight novel about step-family relationships and publishing that does not push any boundaries but does entertain. Grace Truscott, the 37-year-old daughter of a now-deceased senator who was instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act, has grown up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer in New York City, despite having witnessed, as a child, her father's accidental killing of his black secretary's husband. She decides to write a biography of her father, determined to include everything she knows, but sets off a firestorm when she contacts the secretary's daughter, Nola Emory, to corroborate the facts. Her own mother, Cordelia Truscott, tries to stop her from writing the truth since she is raising funds for a library memorializing the senator and fears the book will adversely affect donations. At the same time, Grace is struggling to resolve an amorous relationship with her Jewish editor Jack Gold, a man 15 years her senior. Both Grace's son and Jack's daughter muck things up as often as possible--he by hinting that he may go live with his father, she by crankily refusing to be civil. The often-thwarted romance with Gold is sweet, but it is hard to swallow that a wildly successful and confident woman would be waiting wistfully for a marriage proposal. Descriptions of New York restaurants, name-dropping, and current references will date this book quickly, but the image of Norman Mailer performing a see-saw barrel act in a fundraiser circus is priceless. There are few surprises here, and a number of stereotypes, but Goudge compensates by moving along at a snappy pace. (First printing of 150,000; Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.