Overview

"Some contended that the American venture was a seduction; others a swindle; others yet, a calling. For Beryl Newland, it was an escape. On the run from a London sickroom and a frustrated suitor, Beryl joins an 1873 cadre of British ""colonists"" led by the Scottish silk merchant George Grant. Their object? To found the ranching town of Victoria, Kansas. Beryl quickly discovers, however, that broken hearts, like broken bodies, know no borders: The Great Plains with its ""champagne air"" beguiles and devastates with stunning impartiality. There, she and the women she meets forge friendship and enmity in a crucible of clashing cultures, violence, and disappointment. Seeking identity and independence from the men - idealists, speculators, and ne'er-do-well aristocrats - who populate Victoria, Beryl finds herself attracted to a talented musician from Russia, an immigrant her brother scorns as a peasant. Only when this relationship leads to near tragedy does Beryl realize how much Old-World social constraints continue to bind them all - and how she, like Victoria's passionate leader George Grant, will have to face down the dangers that accompany loving anyone or anything too much. Air like Champagne: A Novel of Victoria celebrates the lives and legends that added color to Fort Hays and the Smoky Hill region of western Kansas in the 1870s. Drawing upon features of the gothic, the western, and the literary romance, it chronicles one woman's journey to resilience and mature love."

Full Product Details

9798988365310

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""I finished my journey with these characters and I didn't want to let them go! Windholz deftly draws a conflict between a pioneering spirit dedicated to the land and the genteel culture of a class unaccustomed to labor. Richly populated with scenes of loneliness and despair, promise and hope, Air Like Champagne shows remarkable insight into the psychology of colonialism and offers a striking new vision of the men and women who participated in the late nineteenth-century rush to begin new lives on a new continent."" Suzanne B. Falck-Yi, Editor of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford) and Two on a Tower (Cambridge)."

Author Information

Born and raised in the Rocky Mountain West, Anne Windholz holds a PhD in Victorian Literature from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a board certified chaplain. She has authored articles and essays exploring spirituality and healthcare, women writers, and transatlantic literary relations in the nineteenth-century. Windholz currently lives, teaches, and writes in west-suburban Chicago.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available