The Linnet Bird

A historical romance with a soft-focus cover, Holeman's first adult novel (she's written a handful of young adult books, including Search of the Moon King's Daughter) opens in Calcutta but quickly flashes back to 1823 Liverpool, England, where its heroine, Linny Gow, is turned into a prostitute by her father shortly after her 11th birthday. Surrounded by poverty and brutality, Linny clings to her dead mother's assurance that she has noble blood, a distinction that solidifies her determination to escape from her sexual slavery and break into the genteel class. Holeman excels at painting the different milieus of the time-from the clammy docks where the whores ply their trade, to the stuffy drawing rooms where the ladies gossip over tea, to India, where a ""fishing fleet"" of poor young well-bred women go in search of husbands. Her physical descriptions can be powerfully tactile and absorbing. But her storylines are couched in cliches, and much of Linny's character is determinedly anachronistic; she's almost proud, for example, of her sexual experience. Such flaws will likely put off those expecting a more rigorous depiction of the period, but Holeman's novel may nonetheless prove an engrossing favorite with historical romance aficionados and fans of Sarah Waters's Victorian dramas.