A Great Beauty

Hazel Lavery was an American socialite who married the artist Sir John Lavery and became a supporter of Irish Independence. This novel focuses on her relationship with the Irish freedom fighter, Michael Collins. Most of the novel is split between the stories of Hazel and of Kitty Kiernan, an Irish friend of Collins who supports him and eventually becomes his girlfriend. I found the Kitty parts of the book at the beginning stronger than the Hazel parts, as her survival in an Ireland torn apart by civil war and crowded by the Black and Tans was far more interesting than Hazel's life of a spoilt socialite everybody admires who has conceived an interest in the Irish Civil War. Going into great detail about her past too slowed the narrative down somewhat. However, if you are reading this to find out about Hazel or even if you found her a more sympathetic character than I did, you might find this interesting. The novel is populated with historical people such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill as well as the Irish freedom fighters. I thought that it seemed well researched too.


Reading the first part I wished that maybe the author would put down the thesaurus during the dialog. I thought the constant use of adjectives and adverbs got a little irritating and made the writing seem a little less polished. People are constantly smiling to themselves. However, this did seem to be a little less obvious as the book went on. I also thought the author overused the plot device of people reading letters they'd found or even leaving letters on desks for people to read, makes you wonder if they had any thought of privacy.  I was not entirely convinced by Hazel's relationship with Michael either, to me it seemed to come out of the blue.


Overall, I thought the author chose a good subject for a novel and had done some good work researching the subject. I found that after a slightly shaky start, I mostly enjoyed reading it. 

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a voluntary review.