Clare is a sixteen-year-old dazzlingly beautiful orphan who is brought up in a bucolic but boring village in England. If you think I’m disappointed, imagine the disappointment of the poor soldier stationed in the Aleutian Islands during WWII who wrote “Fellas have a fever to read Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor.”Īmber St. This book is approximately 1000 pages long in print, covers ten years, and ends on a cliffhanger because the author meant to write a sequel but didn’t get around to it – so you’ve been warned! Also, despite the sexy sexy reputation, there is very little on-page sex. History buffs will find a LOT to get excited about here. Unlike Gone With the Wind, which glamorizes the pre-Civil War era in the South, the Restoration Era is not glamorized and the historical detail is meticulous. Herein I present my findings.īasically what we have here is a Resoration-Era Gone With the Wind, with all the good (strong-willed and ambitious women, amazing clothes) the bad (harmful and hurtful tropes including pervasive racism, the portrayal of women as rivals, and rape-as-seduction) and the your-mileage-will-vary (an anti-heroine as protagonist). It was clear that I must investigate this matter. One soldier wrote, “If you’ve ever seen books that were completely worn out by reading, it was the copies of Forever Amber.” Naturally this meant that soldiers longed to read it. Forever Amber was banned in several states at the time because of, as the Attorney General of Massachusetts so helpfully counted, “70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, 7 abortions, and 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men.” I had to read Forever Amber because of another book, When Books Went To War by Molly Guphill Manning. There’s also great historical detail, and I cannot tell a lie, I tore through this book as though it was a bag of Cheetos, in that I knew it was bad for me but I couldn’t put it down until it was all gone. There’s a lot of toxic crap in it, and it features an amoral anti-heroine. Some books defy reviews and Forever Amber, written by Kathleen Winsor in 1944, is one of them. Genre: Historical: European, Literary Fiction