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Books : Loving Frank: A Novel |
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780345495006
ISBN: 0345495004
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: April 08, 2008
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: April 08, 2008
Studio: Ballantine Books
Sales Rank: 130
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
“Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.”
–Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
“This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.”
——Scott Turow
“It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton
“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever leave.”
–Elizabeth Berg
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Fantastic story -- takes a bit of time to get into the plot, but provides many thought-provoking issues which are still applicable today.
Rating:  -
I was extremely excited to read this book. Note on the 'was excited'....bottom line is this book was plodding at best. I found I had to force myself to read it and often times used it as a sleep aid!
Although FLW was undoubtedly an amazing architect he was by far one of the least likable humans on this earth! Selfish and self-absorbed even with those that he supposedly loved! Mamah was also selfish and self-absorbed AND totally annoying BUT at least she had moments of clarity where ... Read More
Rating:  -
This is a compelling story which for the most part is conveyed in plain, simple, and often pedestrian prose. No doubt the author decided that the plot was so riveting that the appropriate style should be understated, but I think she took this approach to far. Most of the book could have benefited from the kind of lyricism displayed in its concluding chapters. I am nonetheless glad I read it. I had seen the PBS documentary on the Wright-Borthwick romance, so the events were not a surprise, but the ... Read More
Rating: -
As a designer living in Los Angeles, FLW looms fairly large in my world as a general influence on the architecture and aesthetic of the 20th century. I don't know much about him, but I know I can't throw a rock without hitting a FLW building, FLW furniture at the flea market, or some kind of design element influenced by him. Therefore, even on a base level, it was interesting to read this book just to glean some insight on the history of his career, if only for the period of time he was with Mamah ... Read More
Rating: -
A novel based on fact. The places,people and events are real. Nacy Horan brings these people to us in such away, you feel like you are right there with them.
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