The Inheritance

February 6, 2017
This uninspired romance, the introduction to Alers’s Innkeepers series, lacks the sizzle and excitement promised by its present-day New Orleans setting. Attorney Hannah DuPont-Lowell returns to New Orleans to attend her 40th high school reunion. She’s just been laid off and decides to stay in New Orleans and turn her family’s home into an inn. She and professor St. John McNair were close in high school. Now both released (one by widowhood, one by divorce) from what had been unhappy marriages, neither is looking for anything serious, so they agree to see each other while he’s on break for the summer. Alers (Cavanaugh Island) sets up an interesting interracial relationship between white Hannah and African-American St. John, but then relentlessly justifies it (though it needs no justification) by emphasizing that one of Hannah’s ancestors married a Haitian woman and some of St. John’s ancestors were white. No one actually objects to Hannah and St. John’s union, so the constant harping on decades-past transgression is pointless and disruptive, especially when Alers drops it into the middle of the first love scene. Hannah also rails against racism to a degree that interrupts the story and rings false for her character. Hannah’s spirited friends revitalize a tale that would otherwise read more like a curmudgeonly history lesson with a touch of romance.

February 1, 2017
High school acquaintances reconnect at a 40th-year reunion and get a chance at a late-in-life love in vibrant New Orleans.Hannah DuPont-Lowell and St. John McNair knew each other as teenagers, before they graduated and lost touch. Now Hannah, a lawyer, is back in the Crescent City where St. John is a professor, and their chemistry is explosive. Widowed after a troubled marriage, Hannah is wary about men, especially as she is trying to start an inn at her ancestral plantation home after being let go from her New York job. St. John's divorce has left him gun-shy of romance, but he can't stay away from his former study partner. Despite creating an intriguing setup for a mature romance between an African-American Renaissance-man hero and a post-menopausal blonde Southern belle descended from a family of free people of color, Alers (Cherry Lane, 2015, etc.) is uneven in her execution. Topics and actions switch without warning, characters go from discussing solemn memories or beliefs to mundane details with no change in tone, and there are unnecessary references to quotidian tasks. The attention to the racial history of the locale is a strength, particularly Hannah and St. John's conversations about the practice of placage (when wealthy white men essentially bought young women of color as mistresses). But this thematic plus is undermined by the work's structural unevenness as well as a recurring hint of misogyny toward women who serve as a foil to the heroine. The last is an especially regrettable tactic in a novel that resembles female-bonding romance series like the Bride Quartet by Nora Roberts. With more telling than showing, the novel falls short of realizing its potential and capitalizing on its assets: the sensuous Big Easy setting and the rarely encountered middle-age romance.

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February 15, 2017

When her high-powered job falls victim to a corporate merger, widowed attorney Hannah DuPont-Lowell leaves Manhattan and heads home to New Orleans to do what she'd always planned: turn her family's 18-room mansion in the Garden District into an inn. The idea gets a boost when three of her "downsized" New York colleagues come to visit and agree to think about becoming part of her new venture. Her return also coincides with her 40th high school reunion, where she reconnects in a big way with her former lab partner now history professor, St. John (pronounced Sin-jun) McNair. Rich in the history of New Orleans and Creole culture (information on the gens de couleur libres--free people of color--is especially pertinent), this story puts the multicultural landscape in perspective and describes a vibrant community. VERDICT Mature, realistic protagonists, a plethora of family and friends, and a well-researched and thoughtful story that skillfully straddles the line between romance and women's fiction beautifully sets the stage for this fascinating series to come. Alers (Cherry Lane) lives on New York's Long Island.

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