The Exile of Sara Stevenson

May 24, 2010
The remote Cape Wrath lighthouse in 19th-century northwest Scotland provides a perfect setting for Hannah's debut, an underwhelming historical romance in which correspondence, ghosts, and true love travel through time. Headstrong 19 year-old Sara Stevenson, fictional daughter of real-life lighthouse designer Robert Stevenson, is exiled to the lighthouse after her love, Thomas Crichton, gets her pregnant. As she stubbornly awaits the return of her lost sailor love and the birth of his baby, literature lover Sara corresponds with an Oxford antiquarian and receives reluctant assistance from Willy Campbell, a taciturn light keeper haunted by the past. When Sara learns her parents have arranged to take her baby, she asks the Oxford antiquarian to come to her rescue, but unbeknownst to her, there's a very large obstacle in his path. The slight gothic trappings lack foreboding menace, and what could be a delicious love story fizzles into a poorly conceived exercise in spiritual uplift.

April 15, 2010
This haunting, elegiac tale pays tribute to the power and endurance of love. After Sara Stevenson, daughter of renowned lighthouse designer Robert Stevenson, falls in love with sailor Thomas Chrichton, a man her family considers far beneath her station, the young lovers set plans in motion for a secret elopement. When Thomas fails to show up at the designated rendezvous point, a devastated Sara is left pregnant, alone, and yet curiously hopeful. Cast out by her righteous family, she is sent to live in a remote lighthouse on the windswept shores of Cape Wrath at the northernmost tip of Scotland. Making peace with her strange new life, she attracts the attention of the enigmatic lightkeeper and slowly begins to move forward. Both the narrative and the early-nineteenth-century setting are suffused with gloriously gothic elements as a ghostly mystery takes shape around the true circumstances of Thomas puzzling disappearance and dramatic reentry into Saras life. True romantics will suspend their disbelief and revel in the mystical passion of this timeless love story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2010
In 1814 Edinburgh, Sara Stevenson has brought shame to her well-educated, well-respected family by choosing the wrong young man to love. Worse yet, she not only gave Thomas Crichton her heart but she's expecting his child out of wedlock. On the day they were to elope, Thomas mysteriously disappeared, and Sara is banished to one of her father's most remote lighthouses on the wild Highland coast. Now she's under the watch of the unsociable lighthouse keeper, William Campbell, who's keeping some dark secrets of his own. Will either Sara or William survive the storm that brews between them? VERDICT The historical information on sailing the Scottish coast, details on how lighthouses functioned, and realistic portrayal of Highland life are the highlights in this slow-paced debut. Hannah's characters are fairly two-dimensional, and Sara is particularly hard to like, being alternately willful and whiny, although she softens toward the end. The underlying, semimystical story line explains the ghostly apparitions and time travel in the final chapter but doesn't prevent the novel from feeling a bit flat.Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2010
A feisty aristocrat seeks out her destiny at the end of the world.

In her debut novel, Hannah indulges a fascination with lighthouses and historical fiction to craft an imaginative fantasy that veers precariously between tasteful romance and bodice-ripper."Someone once told me that every tower had a ghost, and every ghost had a story," begins narrator Sara Stevenson, the fictionalized daughter of the famous Scottish lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Newly pregnant, the scandalized girl has been exiled to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly point in Great Britain, in the year 1814. Furious with her family, she mourns the loss of her suitor, Thomas Crichton, a sailor who mysteriously vanished on the day of their planned elopement. Her reluctant protector in this uneasy locale is the secretive light-keep William Campbell, a gentle but brusque man who Sara seems to be forever accusing of ill intentions, even as he keeps a secret of his own. The collision of these two characters is highly entertaining, but Hannah muddies the fish-out-of-water story with an incongruous mystery. Sara is intrigued when she receives in the post an unusual timepiece, delivered by an Oxford scholar who promised to return it to another woman, Sara Crichton, at the wish of her dying husband. This wrinkle makes all the time-traveling in Diana Gabaldon's series seem absolutely straightforward by comparison, although Hannah manages to keep the mystery afloat right up until the story's end. Along the way, though, the author often makes too obvious an attempt to formalize her language while indulging in lots of hand-wringing about love torn asunder. Yet readers may find themselves won over by Stevenson's fundamental conflict."Two different men from totally different worlds there could not be," she says,"and, God help me, but my heart was overwhelmed with a want of both of them."

A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.

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