The Price of a Pearl
Laura Carroll Butler’s debut novel The Price of a Pearl opens in the England of 1773, when innocent young Rebecca Newland is intended to marry Baron Davis Edderle, handsome, charming young man who is also a loudly-rumored womanizer.
Rebecca’s younger sister, Susanne, likewise becomes the intended bride of Davis Edderle’s long-time close friend Michael Brooks, a successful London debut novelist who looks to Susanne for a kind of personal salvation. But the emotional cross-currents in Butler’s narrative run deep and strong, and this sunny picture of sisters each happily married is quickly complicated.
Rebecca belatedly realizes that there exists “an entire culture of extramarital relationships, circular and twisted” in her social set, but Davis and Michael share an even darker secret than their mutual womanizing, and as their personal and financial fortunes change over the course of the book, that secret threatens to erupt to the surface of their lives.
Butler handles all this highly dramatic material with skill and restraint, and she creates a richly textured broader background against which to tell her story. The Price of a Pearl is a very rewarding work of great emotional complexity.
