Loving Frank Review
Loving Frank is truly historical fiction at its best. The story of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney is told with depth and insight by Nancy Horan. Although a fictionalized account of their life and time together, Ms. Horan makes the reader feel as if he/she is a witness to all that transpires. Much has been written about Frank Lloyd Wright, but little has been written about Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who was a bright and unconventional woman ahead of her time. Ms. Horan's depiction of their life together is credible and feels very real. Portraying Frank Lloyd Wright through the eyes of the woman he loves allows us to see the legend in a very human way.
Loving Frank Overview
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 groundbreaking historical 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 Mamah’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, and her unforgettable journey, marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leads inexorably to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Loving Frank Specifications
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
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Customer Reviews
Not a shallow love story. - Jody Kay -
Beautifully written. Intreaguing. Lots of story. Powerful w/o maudling emotion. Love, Divorce, children, social attitudes, survival in early 1900's.
A must read for Frank Lloyd Wright fans - MayYvonne -
If you've been to Oak Park/Chicago and seen some of this architect's outstanding buildings, then this book is a must. It's the story of Frank running off to Europe with the attractive wife of one of his clients, and gives a lot of incites to the man and how he thought and operated.
Less than compelling - R. Taft - London, UK
This book was boring. The writer takes us along a poetic meandering of bad choices. I found this book very hard to finish and did put is aside for a few weeks.
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