Somewhere Lies the Moon

Like the Scottish Highlands glen where the heart of her new historical romance beats, Davis's prose is sometimes vibrant and alluring, sometimes impenetrable as gorse--especially for a reader new to her ongoing saga of the Rose clan (Too Deep for Tears). Despite the awkward premise that a contemporary young woman is reliving the tangled events of her 19th century ancestors, the novel will reward persistent readers. Mairi Rose Kittredge, the matriarch of Glen Affric, has embraced as daughters the love-children of her dead husband, Charles Kittredge, a British diplomat who had fathered Lian in China and Genevra in India, as well as Ailsa with Mairi in Scotland. The three half-sisters, who first meet as young women at the time of their father's death, remain empathically connected until dream-summoned back to the Glen, 17 years later, where Mari is on her deathbed. Their lives are described at exhausting length, and husbands and lovers and sons never quite completely claim the women's souls. Indeed, the most intriguing intimacies in the book are between women. An especially compelling triangle unites Ailsa, her pubescent daughter, Ena, and Jenny Fraser, whose late husband, Ian, is Ena's father. Though the betrayal is painful, childhood best friends Jenny and Ailsa eventually reconcile because of their shared love for Ena. As the novel gains momentum, it dispenses words of wisdom about mothers and daughters, women's power to forgive and the need of men to indulge in bloody, tragic heroics. (Sept.)