Loving Frank: A Novel | Nancy Horan

Loving Frank: A Novel | Nancy Horan | A sleeper at first.

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Loving Frank: A Novel

	Loving Frank: A Novel Nancy Horan Ballantine Books, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 174 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America?s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney?s profound influence on Wright.

Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan?s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah?s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel?s stunning conclusion.

Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Advance praise for Loving Frank:

?Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It?s mesmerizing and fascinating?filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago?all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.?
?Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light

?This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.?
??Scott Turow

?It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright?s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.?
??Jane Hamilton

?I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she?ll ever leave.?
?Elizabeth Berg

From the Hardcover edition.

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Loving This

Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Oak Park is on a spacious street that boasts several of his houses, two blocks from where I grew up. That street never loses its charm, though I've walked down it many times. Next door to my family lived a Frank Lloyd Wright impersonator/ expert who would don his black cape and wide-brimmed hat to give talks at some library or historical society. "There goes Frank Lloyd Wright," we would say whenever we saw Mr.Shepherd.
Now I regret that I never took advantage of the opportunity to learn about FLW from my neighbor's lectures, because due to this book, Loving Frank, I have become fascinated. Why was I never curious before? Evidence of his genius is all around Oak Park, and geniuses are often obsessive and tempermental and fascinating, aren't they? Horan bring FLW to life as a sensitive yet arrogant creative genius, basing a lot of FLW's character and dialogue on FlW's actual writings and ideas.
We see him through the eyes of his mistress, Mrs.Cheney. I was fascinated with her from the start also, curious to learn about her relationship with FLW, how she made that difficult choice to leave her children, and also because I heard about her tragic ending from my dad, when I was telling him that there's a new book about FLW and the mistress Cheney. He said, "Oh, yeah, you know that she-----?" No I didn't; thanks, you spoiler! But actually, knowing her fate increased my curiosity.
I found her to be a complex character, who had to follow the love of her life, yet felt guilty and missed her children every day. I couldn't help but sympathize with her as a reader, because we are so much inside her head throughout this book. Horan portrays her as a gentle intellectual who becomes involved with the feminist movement in order to defend her right to see her children and be treated equally as a divorcee.

I loved going through the ups and downs of FLW relationship with her, asking, is it worth it? The situation was always so precarious, financially, socially, emotionally. I couldn't put this book down.

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A sleeper at first.

I picked up this book two times and tried to get into it, the third time, I made myself read it. About the middle of the book, I could not put it down, fabulous read.

Loved Loving Frank

Really enjoyed reading this book;learned a lot about the personal and professional life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Would recommend this book.

A Fascinating Read

Having grown up knowing who Frank Lloyd Wright was (a famous architect), but knowing little about him personally, I was unprepared for the eagerness and antipation with which I devoured this novel once I began. I was intrigued by the great intellects Frank and Mamah are portrayed as having. Their fictionalized conversations are fascinating! All the while I was appalled by their affair and decision to leave their families--notably their children. This is a wholly engaging read with an ending that, if you are not already aware of the historical facts, will give you a shocking surprise.

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