The Marrying Kind - Hardcover

Admirers of Stirling's The Penny Wedding (1995), a companionable story of loves and marriages in a struggling 1930s Glasgow family, will find this sequel even more persistently involving. Here, four love affairs marooned on the jagged rocks of circumstance and obsession eventually sail into happy marital harbors. Alison Burnside, previously rescued by one-armed teacher Jim Abbott from a dreary life keeping house for her father and four brothers, is now in her first year of medical school. Among her university ``team'' is the dirt-poor but charming Irishman Declan Slater, who attracts to his cold-water digs not only the handsome Roberta, daughter of a famous surgeon, but Alison, who's starved for the exciting physical attention fianc‚ Jim seems too repressed to give. Alison will also be confused by her passing attraction to the elegant Howard, another teammate, and Roberta will consider without enthusiasm the prospect of marriage with stuffy Guy. But soon Roberta is forced to give up a medical career--and maybe her reputation as well. And what of Alison's brothers? Jack's blowzy wife Brenda, the mother of twins, is stirred by an old flame; and Henry, married to German Trudi, is sent by his newspaper to Hitler's Germany and discovers some shocking truths about Trudi and an emerging terror he couldn't have imagined. What will become of his marriage? At the last, Alison and Jim--for a time a patient in a TB hospital--shake out true feelings from a leaf-cover of misunderstandings and pretense. Like Stirling's dramas set in earlier eras, this is lively with bright dialogue and an easy pace, allowing plenty of room for commentary and romance. A gossip-gala of considerable charm. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Set in pre-WWII Glasgow, this appealing coming-of-age novel centers around third-year medical student Alison Burnside as she struggles toward the realization that having it all is impossible. At the same time, all the characters, one way or another, illustrate just how naive the world was on the eve of Hitler's reign of terror. At the heart of Alison's dilemma is her long-standing engagement to Jim Abbott, a one-armed WWI veteran whose support has enabled her to obtain the education her working-class family could not afford. Her commitment to Jim is promptly tested by a fling with the handsome but penniless Irishman Declan Slater, by her friendship with rich and dashing Howard McGrath and finally by Jim himself, who, when he contracts tuberculosis, feels Alison is better off without him. In the meantime, Declan and Roberta Logie, another classmate, conduct a clandestine affair, while Howard valiantly pursues Alison. While Alison must decide whether her commitment to Jim outweighs her infatuation with Howard and the promising post she's been offered, Roberta's options disappear when she becomes pregnant by Declan. As in all of Stirling's novels (most recently, Shadows on the Shore, 1994), secondary characters and rich subplots abound. Exposing her characters to feminism, class conflict and the stormclouds of war, Stirling expertly guides them through the growing pains of the heart into genuine maturity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.