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ROSES
A NOVEL
Leila Meacham
Spanning the 20th
century, the story
of Roses
takes place in a
small East Texas
town against the
backdrop of the
powerful timber and
cotton industries,
industries
controlled by the
scions of the town's
founding families.
Cotton tycoon Mary
Toliver and timber
magnate Percy
Warwick should have
married but unwisely
did not, and now
must deal with the
deceit, secrets, and
tragedies of their
choice and the loss
of what might have
been—not just for
themselves but for
their children, and
children's children.
With expert,
unabashed,
big-canvas
storytelling,
Roses covers a
hundred years, three
generations of
Texans and the
explosive
combination of
passion for work and
longing for love.
Reviews:
"It's been
almost 30 years since the heyday of
giant epics in the grand tradition of
Edna Ferber and Barbara Taylor Bradford,
but Meacham's debut might bring them
back. This story of two founding
families in a small East Texas town
spans the 20th century. When Mary
Toliver inherits her family's cotton
plantation, Somerset, in 1916, it tears
apart her family; her mother turns to
alcohol, and her brother leaves. Mary's
obsession with Somerset even causes her
to lose the love of her life, timber
magnate Percy Warwick. By the time she's
85, Mary is determined that the family
curse will not continue and, despite her
grandniece's love of Somerset, plans for
the plantation to be sold after her
death. Mary Toliver and Percy Warwick
can't share anything more than
friendship, but Mary's actions might
allow Rachel to see past Somerset to the
man who loves her. VERDICT Readers who
like an old-fashioned saga will devour
this sprawling novel of passion and
revenge. Highly recommended."
—Library Journal
"This enthralling
stunner, a good old-fashioned read,
may herald the overdue return of
those delicious doorstop epics from
such writers as Barbara Taylor
Bradford and Colleen McCullough.
Meacham's multigenerational family
saga, set in East Texas circa
1914–1985, charts the transformation
of Mary Toliver, a wide-eyed
16-year-old heiress, into a
calculating cotton plantation queen
as hardheaded as Scarlett O'Hara.
Her brother, Miles, goes off to WWI,
returns home, but then goes back to
France to marry Marietta, a French
Communist, leaving Mary to deal with
their plantation, Somerset, and
Darla, their alcoholic mother (who
later hangs herself ). Many years
later, Mary, now an elderly,
terminally ill widow, resolves to
defeat the “Toliver Curse” and
regrets “selling her soul for
Somerset” and giving up her true
love, Percy Warwick, the father of
their secret child, to marry their
friend Ollie DuMont, who helped her
save Somerset when Percy refused.
Meacham uses three well-balanced
viewpoints: Mary's, Percy's and
Rachel's, Mary's great-niece, who
must confront Percy when she
discovers some disquieting family
information after Mary dies. A
refreshingly nostalgic bouquet of
family angst, undying love and 'if
onlys.'"
(Jan.)
—Publishers Weekly
"The Wars of the
Roses relocate to America as a
struggle between the Toliver and
Warwick families, descended
respectively from the houses of
Lancaster and York. Emigrating to
South Carolina in 1670, these proud
clans provided a youngest son each
to the 1836 Revolution in Texas,
where generations of their offspring
have been scrapping ever since. It
had to happen that one of the
Tolivers would start a-smooching
with one of the Warwicks, and so
Mary Toliver and Percy Warwick find
themselves here in bodice-ripping
contortions and secret pacts. Do
such stories ever end happily?
Meacham begins her saga in recent
times, when elderly Mary decides to
act on long-hidden feelings by
tweaking the noses of her assembled
heirs, who patiently await their cut
of fortune and a big, beautiful
estate in the piney woods, part of a
genteel town that Mary has pretty
well single-handedly put in the
pages of Southern Living and Texas
Monthly, which "extolled its Greek
Revivalist charm, regional cuisine,
and clean restrooms." There are
worse places on earth, and worse
people than the feuding Texans,
though as dark secrets go, Mary and
Percy's is less dark than most
gothic-romance readers are used to.
Still, there are plenty of broken
hearts (and at least one broken
organ). As San Antonio novelist
Meacham (Crowning Design, 1984,
etc.) writes of one such instance,
"He would never lack for her
affection, commitment, and respect,
but she felt the part of her that
had loved and been loved by the only
man she could ever care for curl up
in some remote, hidden corner of her
being like an animal whose time has
come to die." Cue the violins and
tears, as Meacham's saga winds
slowly to a foreseeable but
satisfying conclusion. A suitably
long and intermittently engaging
descendant of such Southern-fried
epics as Gone with the Wind and
Giant-just the thing for genre fans
with time to spare."
—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Leila Meacham is a writer and
former teacher who lives in San Antonio,
Texas.
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