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Title: The Jewel Box

Author: Anna Davis

Narrator: Eve Karpf

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-15-10

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Chick Lit

Publisher's Summary:

London 1927: the city is buzzing with life. By day, Grace Rutherford is a copywriter at one of London's biggest advertising agencies but by night she is Diamond Sharp, author of a racy gossip column. When Grace meets two Americans who are sworn enemies, she is drawn into a web of secrets and lies which will change her life forever....

Members Reviews:

Formulaic chick lit with historical veneer

Set in London in the 1920s, this love triangle is basic formulaic chick lit with a historical veneer. The author has done some research and come up with a few neat little details -- like the fact that the statue of Eros at Picadilly Circus was taken down while they constructed a big tube station underneath. But there's little authentic historical atmosphere. The author simply lacks the talent to bring the past to life and interesting "factoids" can't substitute for true historical feeling.

The story concerns Grace, who has a "sharp bob" and a complicated past and her attraction to two dashing Americans -- an author based loosely on a mixture between E. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and a newspaper reporter for the New York Times. These two themselves once loved the same woman who went bonkers a la Zelda Fitzgerald and died. In fact triangles are all over this novel. Grace and her sister were in love with two brothers but one of them died in the First World War. The second married Grace's sister but had an affair with Grace.

Well it's all very complicated and tragic -- the problem is that neither of these men really springs off the page. We read about their animal magnetism but we don't feel it.

Grace writes a gossip column devoted to bright young things and trendy night spots in London -- it reads as if it were written in the 1990s.

This book is not truly objectionable. It made for a pleasant diversion during a cross-country flight. It's just not that great.

Disappointing

After I finished this book I read the interview with the author and was left even more disappointed for it is clear that Davis had ambitious hopes for this story and saw it clearly in her mind--yet none of it expresses itself in the book. The Jewel Box aims for too much and misses it all: a story of post-WWI cynicism, love triangles, the position of women after the suffragette movement, the relationship between mothers and daughters, between sisters, the role of women who are no longer debutantes, and so on, all mixed into the "Lost Generation" of late 1920s England. Because Davis misses the many opportunities to tie her themes together, it's difficult to care about any of the characters--particularly more so when 90% of them are sketched so vaguely it's a wonder they aren't a figment of Grace's (our heroine the writer) imagination. Though the story is anchored by interesting snippets of Grace's pseudonymous Bright Young Thing column, even that feels false, as the entire book seems too self-aware of the impending future (Great Depression, WWII, etc). Ultimately, The Jewel Box is a mixed-bag of missteps and half-formed themes and ideas. It's very well written and the dialogue is seamless, but the actual plot is nonexistent and the here-to-there movement of the characters shows this.