Billie's Kiss Book

Although the premise of this dark, inventive novel is almost absurdly romantic--a brooding hero and a pink-haired heroine, both in mourning, are thrown together in a stark, windswept landscape that evokes the Yorkshire moors--Elizabeth Knox's astonishing gift for language and imagery lift Billie's Kiss above others in its genre. It is 1903, and Murdo Hesketh (a fair-haired Heathcliff) is returning to his cousin's remote Scottish island estate, where he is engaged to implement the many "improvements" his wealthy cousin is foisting on the unwilling islanders. Just as his ship reaches harbor, Billie Paxton, a young female passenger, jumps onto land, avoiding by seconds the explosion that destroys the ship. Is she responsible for the destruction of the Gustav Edda and the deaths of her sister Edith and just-born nephew, as well as of Hesketh's loyal servant and friend, Ian Betler? Knox's third novel takes a few pages to get going, and some will find its uneven pace disorienting. But it is hard to put down a book in which the heroine accidentally throws a bucket of bile at the hero, and in which some 20 people die within the first 130 pages. Eventful and lushly descriptive, Billie's Kiss has the atmosphere of Jane Eyre with the revisionist sensibility of Wide Sargasso Sea. --Regina MarlerRead More