Lost Autumn by Mary-Rose MacColl

Lost Autumn by Mary-Rose MacColl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 stars rounded up.

It looks like the title of this book has changed from "The True Story of Maddie Bright
by Mary-Rose MacColl" so you might have read this already - don't be fooled.

This book has some trigger issues that may bother some readers: rape, assault, cancer.

I must agree with another reader that said that this book would have made a perfect trilogy. And I think it would have made a BETTER trilogy. I invested a lot of myself into reading this and felt a tad cheated at the end-fuller length stories, books or even novella might have given me that little something that my heart missed.

Both women deserved to have a fuller story told; a less rushed and somewhat confusing conclusion.

This book did hold my interest after the first few chapters -and the first chapter does resonate and really stay with you throughout the entire novel.

I had wished that the characters grew a little more, but I see that there really wasn't enough time for them to do so.

I do think that it was a very emotional novel and an interesting look into the early 20th-century royalty.

*ARC supplied by the publisher.

"An emotional novel of love and the power of lost dreams from an internationally bestselling master of historical fiction, about a young woman's coming-of-age in 1920 and the secrets that surface more than seventy years later
Australia, 1920. Seventeen-year-old Maddie Bright embarks on the voyage of a lifetime when she's chosen to serve on the cross-continent tour of His Royal Highness, the dashing Edward, Prince of Wales. Life on the royal train is luxurious beyond her dreams, and the glamorous, good-hearted friends she makes--with their romantic histories and rivalries--crack open her world. But glamour often hides all manner of sins.
Decades later, Maddie lives in a ramshackle house in Brisbane, whiling away the days with television news and her devoted, if drunken, next door neighbor. When a London journalist struggling with her own romantic entanglements begins asking Maddie questions about her relationship to the famous and reclusive author M.A. Bright, she's taken back to the glamorous days of the royal tour--and to the secrets she's kept for all of these years"

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