Book Review: The Jeweled Daughter

Title: The Jeweled Daughter

Author: Anne Maybury

Date: 1976

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: none

Length: 182 pages

Quote: “Sarah Brent is a young gemologist with a brilliant future...married to the orthopedic surgeon Marius Brent.”

But Sarah and Marius are estranged, and Sarah is working for “too-rich,” often-divorced Theodora, whose “blind willfulness to acquire what she wanted” has “led her on...foolhardy adventures,” and in this book Sarah, Theodora, Marius, Sarah's father, and one of Theodora's ex-husbands get into a foolhardy adventure involving possibly stolen jade in Hong Kong.

No surprise to regular readers: this one's not my kind of book. I don't know how realistic it is but, from the fact that it's a well-crafted suspense novel tied off in a tidy little heart-shaped bow, I suspect it's not realistic at all. One detail that is realistic is Sarah's English father's glib pronouncements about “knowing the Oriental character”; people still talked that way in 1976, and you could say the character pays for his arrogance in the end...well, that'd be telling.

If you like cloak-and-dagger adventures among the very young and very rich, The Jeweled Daughter is your kind of book. It's a nice “clean” story in which everyone uses polite language, all the sex and violence are offstage, and both adultery and murder are much more suspected than done. I wouldn't call it wholesome but I would go so far as “inoffensive.” And it's a pretty fantasy; all those jewels and works of art in a lush, leafy estate (on an island where the real-world news often seems to suggest that real-world people are lucky if they can afford their own beds). Brain candy. Enjoy.

What I sold, in between the writing and the posting of this review, was a hardcover copy. The book is also available in paperback and doesn't seem to have gained collection value fast, either way, so it's available on this web site's standard terms (see the Greeting): $5 per copy, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. Anne Maybury no longer needs $1 but you could fit at least five, probably seven, books of this size into the package along with this one, so keep scrolling to find Fair Trade Books for which your payment will be partly used to encourage living writers...or you may suggest titles of your choice, as long as either (a) they're widely available secondhand or (b) you're willing to buy them new from this web site. (If we say new, we'll ship them new--unopened, shrinkwrapped if the publisher sells them that way.)