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| Loving Frank: A Novel | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 143 reviews)
Sales Rank: 39
Category: Book
Author: Nancy Horan
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Studio: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Label: Ballantine Books
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0345495004
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780345495006
ASIN: 0345495004
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Release Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew
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| Customer Reviews: Read 138 more reviews...
Loving Frank at the expense of others. August 19, 2008
Having visited the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio in Oak Park on vacation a few years ago, I was familiar with the tragic end of Frank and Mamah's relationship. I was delighted to find this book that might explain the story in an interesting way. While not giving any particular insight into Frank Lloyd Wright's intentions and feelings, the author Nancy Horan wrote a strong novel about Mamah's.
This book is well written, and Horan delved into Mamah's feminists beliefs and work. But the middle of the book, centered around her work with feminist Ellen Key, was the least interesting to me. It felt like Horan was trying to explain Mamah's abandonment of her children by illustrating how `forward thinking' she was. I couldn't buy it. This is not a complaint about the author or the book, but I could never understand how Mamah could walk away from her kids, and found it hard to suspend my judgement. In any case, this book is interesting enough to be recommended. Read it, and see what you think of Mamah.
 Brings History to Life August 17, 2008
This novel touches on the currents and issues facing America in the early 20th century. A growing middle class, having left the farm for the city and suburb, is commissioning custom designed homes . Teachers, librarians and other female workers are paid near poverty wages. Well off suburban women, like Mamah Cheney drive cars (albeit hand cranked) are free of domestic drudge (through low paid domestic help) and join clubs and form literary groups. What else do they do all day? The times are well depicted, complete with the Bohemian cafes of Germany and the stateside canvassing for woman's sufferage. At the end Mamah worries about her European friends in the wake of the Archduke's assassination.
Nancy Horan brings to life a woman who left her comfortable home and marriage for the man who later becomes iconic. It is an operatic story, and a quick internet search shows that there is an opera, The Shining Brow, based on it.
The character of Mamah is lovingly drawn. This character is hard to reconcile with the woman who did not just leave her children, she took them to Colorado and cabled her husband to pick them up so that she could meet FLW in Germany. Once she did this, the Rubicon had been crossed. While the patient Edwin would take her back, how would this really work? What of her sister who had given so much for her and suffered public humiliation for Mamah's actions? Once Mamah leaves, there really is no going back.
Horan's portrait of Wright, while sympathetic includes his flaws. In Horan's interpretation, Wright is unable to tell Mamah, who left everything behind for him, neither his true financial status, nor his actual relations or communications with his wife and 6 children. These things seep into her consciousness when it is too late to turn back the clock.
The book sets the stage for what followed in Wright's life. Wright is not a young man and it's like starting all over. For those interested in the next stage of his life I highly recommend the non-fiction book Fellowship, The: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship.
Horan is to be saluted not only for this work of fiction, but for the research. She has brought together a lot of important material, and while this is a work of fiction, it adds perspective on FLW and his legacy.
Loving Frank is a book to love August 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is incredible! The research it took writer Nancy Horan before writing this book is immense. The detail, discriptions, observations and love of Frank resonates on many levels in this truly great book. It is a tragic and wonderful love story and an important part of American history.
lLoving Frank: A Novel
Great read. August 16, 2008
I enjoyed this book immensely. I hope Ms. Horan continues to write about strong women in recent US history.
Loving Frank August 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Book was in excellent condition, can't say I exactly enjoyed the content, but I always order book club selections from Amazon easy ,fast
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