Review: No Hearts of Gold

Title: No Hearts of Gold 

Author: Jackie French

Publisher: 1st December 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Pages: 407 pages

How I Read It: ARC book

Genre: women’s fiction, historical fiction

My Rating: 4.5 cups

Synopsis:

SOME GIRLS ARE BORN TO BE LOVED,

SOME ARE BORN TO BE USEFUL,

AND SOME ARE BORN TO BE BAD ...

Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is sold in an arranged marriage to a colony across the world. Lady Viola Montefiore is the dark-skinned changeling of a ducal family, kept hidden and then shipped away. Titania Boot is as broad as a carthorse, and as useful.

On the long sea voyage from their homeland of England, these three women are fast bonded in an unlikely friendship. In the turmoil of 1850s Australia - which has reinvented itself from convict colony to a land of gold rushes and illusive riches - one woman forges a business empire, while another turns to illegal brewery, working alongside a bushranger as the valleys around her are destroyed. The third vanishes on her wedding day, in a scandal that will intrigue and mystify Sydney's polite society and beyond.

In this magnificent and broad-sweeping saga, award-winning author Jackie French defies the myth of colonial women as merely wives, servants, petty thieves or whores. Instead, in this masterful storyteller's hands, these three women will be arbiters of a destiny far richer than the bewitching glitter and lure of gold.

My Thoughts

She was suffocating in this room and under that small sky. Surely, in a land as large as Australia, one might rid oneself of any husband who was too repressive, or even one who loved as immoderately as Papa had loved.

No Hearts of Gold, is a wonderful new story from Jackie French about three very different women who forge new lives for themselves in colonial New South Wales. Jackie is Australian royalty when it comes to writing and her historical fiction works are outstanding. 

Yet Viola had discovered that smiling at the world also came at a cost. When you smiled at people and met their eyes you noticed the most fleeting of their expressions - the shadowed eyes despite cheerful faces, envy, fear or loneliness. Smiling was one of the coins you paid for love, but it meant you paid in other ways, for when you smiled you learned to care.

The three leading protagonists -  Kat, Viola and Titania - are very different yet come together to make a new life in a new land. It is their friendship and what each of them brings from their past, that provides the support needed to survive in this new colony. What Jackie does best is give a voice to the women from Australia’s past and through her meticulous research invites her readers to walk with the women on a most compelling journey. 

No Hearts of Gold is superb reading and testimony once again just as to why Jackie French is so revered as a writer when it comes to Australian historical dramas. 

It was a way of linking the joy-filled girl that she had been with the fulfilled 

woman she was now. She smiled and lifted the teapot and filled the cups again with 

the smooth liquid which was not only tea. Some girls were not born to be good.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.