Summary: Recounts the life of Frank Lloyd Wright as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* The women who inspired Boyle s latest fictional improvisation on the lives of historic figures are the lovers and wives of the master architect Frank Lloyd Wright. While Wright s ambition, ego, and flamboyance are legendary, the passionate women who loved him are known primarily as the victims of lurid scandals and outright horrors. Boyle delves deeply into social and emotional territory to write imaginatively and meaningfully about the operatic drama of Wright s world, an ideal subject for this protean, caring, and wisely satirical writer, whose fascination with zealots and their followers led to his novel about Alfred Kinsey, The Inner Circle (2004), and who happens to live in a famous Wright house. Boyle s rendering of Taliesin, the cursed Wisconsin home of Wright s dubious Fellowship, is positively gothic, and for all the swift fury of the plot, this is a character-driven novel in which Boyle empathically portrays Kitty, Wright s first wife and the mother of six of his children; radical and doomed Mamah; mad Miriam; and stalwart Olgivanna. And then there s Boyles piquant narrator, the loyal Wright disciple Tadashi Sato, whose Japanese heritage introduces racism to the story, a theme that reaches fully tragic proportions in Boyle s devastating take on the man who killed Mamah and her two children. Boyle is electrifying in this gorgeously novel of artistic conviction, exalted romance, and appalling moral failings. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.
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