Helpful Score: 3
Book 3 of the Wideacre trilogy by Phillipa Gregory concludes the saga of the Lacey Family...the entire series is slighly bodice ripping, but in a more erudite way (if that makes sense) than expected. If you are a fan of historical fiction, try the Wideacre trilogy. It can be read alone, but it is certainly enhanced by its predecessors.
Helpful Score: 2
This is the last, and in my opinion, the best book in the series.
Helpful Score: 2
With this elaborate tapestry of a young woman's life, the Lacey family trilogy ( Wideacre and The Favored Child ) comes to a satisfying conclusion. Meridon is the lost child whose legacy is the estate of Wideacre. She and her very different sister, Dandy, were abandoned as infants and raised in a gypsy encampment, learning horsetrading and other tricks of survival. They are indentured to a circus master whose traveling show is made successful by Meridon's equestrian flair and Dandy's seductive beauty on the trapeze. Meridon's escape from this world is fueled by pregnant Dandy's murder and her own obsessive dream of her ancestral home. After claiming Wideacre, Meridon succumbs for a while to the temptation of the "quality" social scene, but eventually she comes to her senses, and, in a tricky card game near the end of the saga, triumphs fully. The hard-won homecoming in this historical novel is richly developed and impassioned.
Helpful Score: 2
While I absolutely fell in love with every other book that Gregory wrote, I never really felt that way about this series. I read the first in the series and wasn't overly impressed and could not make myself finish the 2nd book. The third I didn't even attempt. Since the readers here mostly liked the book, I will save them and reread at a later date. See, people do read these reviews and let them influence them on books to read.
Helpful Score: 2
This book was a very satisfying ending to the Wideacre trilogy. The first two books are hard to get through as the lead characters are among the most unsympathetic, horrible people I have ever read about. Nonetheless, you become interested in the story. With this book, Meridon is the third generation of Laceys at Wideacre, and you begin the book hoping that she will set everything right, based on the horrid scenarios in the last two books. When she makes it to Wideacre, she finds that everything has been set to rights in the absence of the Laceys over the past sixteen years. But will she leave it the happy place it has become, or ruin it? I had glimpses of her ruining it and I nearly put the book down several times, but she would have a thought that lent me some hope that all was not lost. The ending was very pleasing, although I would have liked to have seen her mother-in-law get her comeuppance. If you didn't like the first two, this book redeems the trilogy. If you did like the first two, this is a fitting closure.
