Right now I am reading Prisoners of the Heart by Dolly Kyle. You may know this author from her excellent book, Hillary The Other Woman: A Political Memoir. Dolly is a fantastic writer and reading Prisoners of the Heart has landed me in the south during the 1960s. I am about halfway through now and can’t wait to get back into the book. I love the time period of the 50s and 60s!
The story centers around Kelly and Christi, they have been best friends since they were little kids. As they get older, Kelly falls in love with Cameron, a handsome young man with a promising future.
Sex, drugs, violence and racial prejudice, as well as Vietnam, threaten the lives of family and close friends in this riveting saga that spans the globe and confronts controversial political issues of the times. Clandestine lovers Kelly and Cameron are seen through the eyes of different characters who reveal their own dark secrets that explode in unexpected ways around the world. The unique perspectives exposed in PRISONERS can stand alone or serve as a complement to the psychological pictures drawn in PURPOSES. An insider in a small southern town will glean juicy gossip one whispered tidbit at a time from different neighbors on different days. In the same compelling way, readers of the Heart Trilogy will discover enough enlightening vignettes to understand the complexities lurking beneath the seemingly-innocent surface. It does not matter which neighbor whispers first.
In the next book, Purposes of the Heart, Kelly and Cameron’s story continues:
Kelly and Cameron, a couple of small-town southern kids, met on the country club golf course in the summer of 1959, but they never could say good-bye. Their loves and lives intertwined for decades, and finally collided when novelist Kelly published her journals as thinly-disguised fiction. Sexually-reckless Cameron and his power-hungry, enabling wife Mallory threatened to destroy Kelly for revealing one of Cameron’s many dark secrets, as they would destroy the reputation of every woman who might threaten their frantic quest for the White House. After Cameron was elected president, he publicly pursued Kelly in front of the entire class at their 30th high school reunion, giving Kelly another incredible chapter in an amazing saga. Though Kelly and Cameron’s passionate romance may sound strangely familiar, the unlikely story will reach into your soul and change the way you think and feel.
Though I am still reading Prisoners of the Heart, I wanted to share it with you and direct you towards Dolly’s website where you can order the books in the trilogy. If you enjoy southern fiction, then you will definitely like Dolly’s work. And if you want a page-turning political memoir, you need to read Hillary The Other Woman.
