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The Pretty Ones
Book by Eden, Dorothy
275 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
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About the author
Dorothy Eden
93 books166 followersAka Mary Paradise.
Dorothy Eden was born in 1912 in New Zealand and died in 1982. She moved to England in 1954 after taking a trip around the world and falling in love with the country. She was best known for her many mystery and romance books as well as short stories that were published in periodicals. As a novelist, Dorothy Eden was renowned for her ability to create fear and suspense. This earned her many devoted readers throughout her lifetime.
Dorothy Eden was born in 1912 in New Zealand and died in 1982. She moved to England in 1954 after taking a trip around the world and falling in love with the country. She was best known for her many mystery and romance books as well as short stories that were published in periodicals. As a novelist, Dorothy Eden was renowned for her ability to create fear and suspense. This earned her many devoted readers throughout her lifetime.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 17, 2014
This is a watered down "Rebecca" type story of a young woman who marries a man she barely knows (except that he writes murder mysteries) and goes home to his country estate where she finds not only that her husband has two children (twins) to his prior marriage but also, his ex wife has not been heard from in over two years. This would be a tad suspicious on its own but a governess disappeared as well.
Meanwhile, a skeleton is unearthed in a nearby field and another governess "leaves " under suspicious circumstances. Criptic messages, meetings in deserted crypts, and a collection of assorted family members /staff lead to a reasonably good Gothic who dunnit.
Its a solid three stars but I cant give it more than that. The characters are not too memorable and the suspense doesn't really kick in til the last 50 pages. The ending too I found a bit clumsy and anticlimatic. Still, its a good read for a rainy afternoon.
CONTENT :
SEX : None
VIOLENCE : Very mild
PROFANITY : Very mild
PARANORMAL ELEMENTS : One character is said to dabble in witchcraft. (we never see this)
MY RATING : A mild PG
Meanwhile, a skeleton is unearthed in a nearby field and another governess "leaves " under suspicious circumstances. Criptic messages, meetings in deserted crypts, and a collection of assorted family members /staff lead to a reasonably good Gothic who dunnit.
Its a solid three stars but I cant give it more than that. The characters are not too memorable and the suspense doesn't really kick in til the last 50 pages. The ending too I found a bit clumsy and anticlimatic. Still, its a good read for a rainy afternoon.
CONTENT :
SEX : None
VIOLENCE : Very mild
PROFANITY : Very mild
PARANORMAL ELEMENTS : One character is said to dabble in witchcraft. (we never see this)
MY RATING : A mild PG
August 30, 2024
I have enjoyed a couple of books by this author and made allowances for the dated attitudes towards gender roles, especially toward women. However, this one goes a step further.
Emma works for a magazine as a sub-editor and is sent on her first assignment as a reporter to interview a popular crime novelist, Barnaby Court. She makes a mess of it, but he is impressed with her for reasons other than her interviewing skills and four weeks later they are married, despite her sensible aunt warning her not to trust him. Blithely, she puts him off when he tries to tell her about his background, so she only discovers that he has an ex-wife and twin girls after their marriage. Ex-wife Josephine has (rather implausibly for the 1950s) departed on a trip up the Amazon and is uncontactable, so Emma finds herself playing stepmother to two hostile children at Barnaby's family home in the country on what is supposed to be her honeymoon.
The book has a slightly odd structure because the reader is thrown into things on page one with the discovery of a body by a man who works as a labourer for Dudley, Barnaby's elder brother who actually lives at the property and farms the land. Lots of names are dumped onto the first page with little to no clue who the people are. Only after that is there an extended flashback for some pages which describe how Emma meets and marries Barnaby. Some characters don't really add anything to the story and could be dropped for clarity, such as Barnaby's other brother and his off-stage fiancé.
I would classify this as romantic suspense. The body is that of a young woman, buried for a couple of years according to the police, in a field near the house. Throughout the story, Emma wonders if it could be Josephine's though she also veers towards the dead woman being a governess called Sylvie, who left suddenly at Christmas even though the body had dark hair and Sylvie was blonde. The twins, led by the bolshy Maggy, whom I quite liked, are either distraught that it could be their mother or else lapping up the macabre event and imagining it was Sylvie. They also dislike and play tricks on Louisa, just hired by Barnaby but not very competent. Unsympathetically, Emma takes a disliking to Louisa, labelling her a gold-digger who is trying to 'hook' Dudley. Louisa seems to find success at one point although she is becoming a nervous wreck due to incidents such as someone looking in her upstairs window one night from the creeper growing there. Emma suspects nearly everyone at one time and another, including Barnaby, and this leads to some coldness between her and her husband.
Misogyny is much more overt in this novel as I mentioned earlier. Not only does one character refer to 'whores' a couple of times, but Barnaby tells Dudley, 'Women are the very devil. I thought you knew that,' in front of Emma! So much for a honeymoon!
Parts of the story don't hang together very well. There's an elaborate device of letters being written by women who disappear, but when the identity of the body is finally revealed, it doesn't seem likely that the victim would have written the "practice" one, the finding of which makes the murderer target Emma. His claim that he hadn't meant to kill her is either a continuity error, or an attempt to avoid the gallows. A location near the house becomes key to the dénouement, but it seems such a likely place for the twins to play in that such a late introduction into the story without any foreshadowing is not credible. Altogether, I found this a disappointing read after the author's other two books and can only give it an OK 2 stars.
Emma works for a magazine as a sub-editor and is sent on her first assignment as a reporter to interview a popular crime novelist, Barnaby Court. She makes a mess of it, but he is impressed with her for reasons other than her interviewing skills and four weeks later they are married, despite her sensible aunt warning her not to trust him. Blithely, she puts him off when he tries to tell her about his background, so she only discovers that he has an ex-wife and twin girls after their marriage. Ex-wife Josephine has (rather implausibly for the 1950s) departed on a trip up the Amazon and is uncontactable, so Emma finds herself playing stepmother to two hostile children at Barnaby's family home in the country on what is supposed to be her honeymoon.
The book has a slightly odd structure because the reader is thrown into things on page one with the discovery of a body by a man who works as a labourer for Dudley, Barnaby's elder brother who actually lives at the property and farms the land. Lots of names are dumped onto the first page with little to no clue who the people are. Only after that is there an extended flashback for some pages which describe how Emma meets and marries Barnaby. Some characters don't really add anything to the story and could be dropped for clarity, such as Barnaby's other brother and his off-stage fiancé.
I would classify this as romantic suspense. The body is that of a young woman, buried for a couple of years according to the police, in a field near the house. Throughout the story, Emma wonders if it could be Josephine's though she also veers towards the dead woman being a governess called Sylvie, who left suddenly at Christmas even though the body had dark hair and Sylvie was blonde. The twins, led by the bolshy Maggy, whom I quite liked, are either distraught that it could be their mother or else lapping up the macabre event and imagining it was Sylvie. They also dislike and play tricks on Louisa, just hired by Barnaby but not very competent. Unsympathetically, Emma takes a disliking to Louisa, labelling her a gold-digger who is trying to 'hook' Dudley. Louisa seems to find success at one point although she is becoming a nervous wreck due to incidents such as someone looking in her upstairs window one night from the creeper growing there. Emma suspects nearly everyone at one time and another, including Barnaby, and this leads to some coldness between her and her husband.
Misogyny is much more overt in this novel as I mentioned earlier. Not only does one character refer to 'whores' a couple of times, but Barnaby tells Dudley, 'Women are the very devil. I thought you knew that,' in front of Emma! So much for a honeymoon!
Parts of the story don't hang together very well. There's an elaborate device of letters being written by women who disappear, but when the identity of the body is finally revealed, it doesn't seem likely that the victim would have written the "practice" one, the finding of which makes the murderer target Emma. His claim that he hadn't meant to kill her is either a continuity error, or an attempt to avoid the gallows. A location near the house becomes key to the dénouement, but it seems such a likely place for the twins to play in that such a late introduction into the story without any foreshadowing is not credible. Altogether, I found this a disappointing read after the author's other two books and can only give it an OK 2 stars.
April 20, 2024
Really engaging and entertaining effort from Eden, with an intelligent heroine and a nasty pervert of a culprit (whose identity was obvious from the start).
June 6, 2022
the melodrama of old stories is something to behold, lol
I picked up this and The Shadow Wife at a used bookstore in Coombs last summer but only got around to reading them both this week. The Pretty Ones is by and large the better novel in all aspects: intrigue, suspense, mystery, and drama. The romance was also much better in this one. I'm at least glad picking up some random Gothic novels wasn't a complete bust because I really enjoyed the ride for this one.
I picked up this and The Shadow Wife at a used bookstore in Coombs last summer but only got around to reading them both this week. The Pretty Ones is by and large the better novel in all aspects: intrigue, suspense, mystery, and drama. The romance was also much better in this one. I'm at least glad picking up some random Gothic novels wasn't a complete bust because I really enjoyed the ride for this one.
August 8, 2016
This is another author whose name will be on my Never-To-Read-Again list.
I've often seen authors refer to their books as their babies. There's one big difference though, apart from the obvious, in that real babies will probably be nothing like their parent. They can be smarter and have other talents. Books, on the other hand, can never be cleverer than the person who wrote them. So when I find a book where I can conclude its author isn't very intelligent, I can be sure his/her other works will be of the same intelligence level. I like reading clever stories; I want to learn something from the author and be amazed at the ingenious plot twists he/she invents. The Pretty Ones only taught me something about Dorothy Eden, see above.
For starters, an author should never tell the readers that her heroine is extremely intelligent. Please let the readers find that out for themselves; now they will only be more critical of the heroine's actions to see if the adjective is true. And no, I did not find Emma extremely intelligent. She is a junior reporter sent to interview Barnaby Court, writer of successful crime novels. She apparently didn't do any homework and knew next to nothing about him. Four weeks later she is married to him and only then discovers he has been married before and is a father to eight-year old twins.
They can't go on a honeymoon because the girls' mother hasn't collected them from boarding school, so the day after the wedding Emma, Barnaby and the twins go to the family farm to spend the holidays.
The book started with a teaser: a skeleton is dug up on a field belonging to the farm. The reader is confronted by a plethora of people right away: Willie, Emma, Dina, Maggy, Barnaby, Louisa, Rupert, Dudley, Mrs. Faithfull and Josephine. Please, next time not all at the same time without explaining who they are.
We need to wait until the second half of the book before the scene with the teaser continues.
One of the reasons why I love gothics is that lots of times they are written in first person, providing you the most intense way of identifying with the main character. Dorothy Eden tells the story in third person and often it's like we, the readers, are the audience in a play. We see from a distance and there's no room for close-ups and zooming in on details. Had we been Emma, we could have participated directly in the action. This can be done through third person viewpoint as well, of course, which will probably be more difficult and needs a clever author, which I've already concluded Ms. Eden is not.
A few more things that bothered me, like for example: If your name is Louisa Pinner and you wanted to embroider your handkerchief, would you write "L. Pinner" instead of "LP" or "Louisa"?
And this one is a spoiler:
I'd better stop harping now. Many situations seemed illogical and as I'm a stickler for logic, these might bother me more than other readers.
I'm done with Dorothy Eden and will award her, for effort, a 1 out of 10.
I've often seen authors refer to their books as their babies. There's one big difference though, apart from the obvious, in that real babies will probably be nothing like their parent. They can be smarter and have other talents. Books, on the other hand, can never be cleverer than the person who wrote them. So when I find a book where I can conclude its author isn't very intelligent, I can be sure his/her other works will be of the same intelligence level. I like reading clever stories; I want to learn something from the author and be amazed at the ingenious plot twists he/she invents. The Pretty Ones only taught me something about Dorothy Eden, see above.
For starters, an author should never tell the readers that her heroine is extremely intelligent. Please let the readers find that out for themselves; now they will only be more critical of the heroine's actions to see if the adjective is true. And no, I did not find Emma extremely intelligent. She is a junior reporter sent to interview Barnaby Court, writer of successful crime novels. She apparently didn't do any homework and knew next to nothing about him. Four weeks later she is married to him and only then discovers he has been married before and is a father to eight-year old twins.
They can't go on a honeymoon because the girls' mother hasn't collected them from boarding school, so the day after the wedding Emma, Barnaby and the twins go to the family farm to spend the holidays.
The book started with a teaser: a skeleton is dug up on a field belonging to the farm. The reader is confronted by a plethora of people right away: Willie, Emma, Dina, Maggy, Barnaby, Louisa, Rupert, Dudley, Mrs. Faithfull and Josephine. Please, next time not all at the same time without explaining who they are.
We need to wait until the second half of the book before the scene with the teaser continues.
One of the reasons why I love gothics is that lots of times they are written in first person, providing you the most intense way of identifying with the main character. Dorothy Eden tells the story in third person and often it's like we, the readers, are the audience in a play. We see from a distance and there's no room for close-ups and zooming in on details. Had we been Emma, we could have participated directly in the action. This can be done through third person viewpoint as well, of course, which will probably be more difficult and needs a clever author, which I've already concluded Ms. Eden is not.
A few more things that bothered me, like for example: If your name is Louisa Pinner and you wanted to embroider your handkerchief, would you write "L. Pinner" instead of "LP" or "Louisa"?
And this one is a spoiler:
I'd better stop harping now. Many situations seemed illogical and as I'm a stickler for logic, these might bother me more than other readers.
I'm done with Dorothy Eden and will award her, for effort, a 1 out of 10.
July 30, 2021
3.5 stars.
Another solid Gothic Romance by Dorothy Eden. As I've mentioned before, I prefer her family sagas because of the greater depths of characters shown and the unknown aspect outside of that "happily ever after" safety net a romance has. But her romances are entertaining with all the touch points you want in a Gothic love story, including being a quick read.
Another solid Gothic Romance by Dorothy Eden. As I've mentioned before, I prefer her family sagas because of the greater depths of characters shown and the unknown aspect outside of that "happily ever after" safety net a romance has. But her romances are entertaining with all the touch points you want in a Gothic love story, including being a quick read.
June 9, 2018
Emma falls in love with Barnaby Court. She goes to Courtland where things happen. Good Gothic Romance.
February 20, 2021
B+. fiction, gothic suspense, mystery, murder, from stash, keep
February 24, 2015
Irritating. I didn't care for a single character. Every last one of them could have died and it wouldn't have bothered me a bit.
I hated Emma almost as much as I did the baddie. I didn't like the way she treated Louisa, even though Louisa was a nuisance.
I hated Emma almost as much as I did the baddie. I didn't like the way she treated Louisa, even though Louisa was a nuisance.
July 16, 2011
Enthralling gothic suspense/romance. I'll be looking for more by her shortly.
April 10, 2017
I ate this up as a pre-teen staying at my grandmother's house many years ago. She had a pile of gothic mysteries, along with some good Agatha Christie novels - lovely memories, even if the book is only adequate when compared to others in the genre.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews