5 reviews for The Prodigal Daughter
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The Prodigal Daughter
by Jeffery Archer
Description:
With a will of steel, Polish immigrant Florentyna Rosnovski is indeed Abel’s daughter. She shares with her father a love of America, his ideals, and his dream for the future. But she wants more to be the first female president. Golden boy Richard Kane was born into a life of luxury. The scion of a banking magnate he is successful, handsome, and determined to carve his own path in the world and to build a future with the woman he loves. With Florentyna’s ultimate goal only a heartbeat away, both are about to discover the shattering price of power as a titanic battle of betrayal and deception reaches out from the past-a blood feud between two generations that threatens to destroy everything Florentyna and Richard have fought to achieve.
About The Author
Archer wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in the autumn of 1974, as a means of avoiding bankruptcy. The book was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen and published first in the US, then eventually in Britain in the autumn of 1976. A BBC Television adaptation of the book was broadcast in 1990, and a radio adaptation was aired on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1980s.
Kane and Abel (1979) proved to be his best-selling work, reaching number one on The New York Times bestsellers list. Like most of his early work it was edited by Richard Cohen, the Olympic fencing gold-medallist. It was made into a television mini-series by CBS in 1985, starring Peter Strauss and Sam Neill. The following year, Granada TV screened a ten-part adaptation of another Archer bestseller, First Among Equals, which told the story of four men and their quest to become Prime Minister. In the U.S. edition of the novel, the character of Andrew Fraser was eliminated, reducing the number of protagonists to three.
As well as novels and short stories, Archer has also written three stage plays. The first, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, opened in 1987 and ran at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End for over a year. However, Archer’s next play, Exclusive, was not well received by critics, and closed after a few weeks. His final play, The Accused, opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor on 26 September 2000, before transferring to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in the West End in December.
Archer has stated that he spends considerable time writing and re-writing each book. He goes abroad to write the first draft, working in blocks of two hours at a time, then writes anything up to seventeen drafts in total. In 1988 author Kathleen Burnett accused Archer of plagiarising a story she’d written and including it in his short-story collection, A Twist in the Tale. Archer denied he had plagiarised the story, claiming he’d simply been inspired by the idea.
It has been suggested that Archer’s books undergo an extensive editing process prior to publication. Whilst Archer’s books are commercially successful, critics have been generally unfavourable towards his writing. However, journalist Hugo Barnacle, writing for The Independent about The Fourth Estate (1996), thought the novel, while demonstrating that “the editors don’t seem to have done any work”, was “not wholly unsatisfactory”.
Since 2010, Archer has written the first draft of each new book at his luxury villa in Majorca, called “Writer’s Block”.
In 2011, Archer published the first of seven books in The Clifton Chronicles, which follow the life of Harry Clifton from his birth in 1920, through to the finale in 2020. The first novel in the series, Only Time Will Tell, tells the story of Harry from 1920 through to 1940, and was published in the UK on 12 May 2011. The sixth instalment, Cometh the Hour, was published on 25 February 2016. The final novel in the series, This Was a Man, was published on 3 November 2016.
Archer’s next novel has been provisionally titled Heads You Win, and will be published in 2017, along with another volume of short stories.
Skryf Review
“Amazing Reading”
Smit
I was hooked from the beginning til the end. The plot is well-written, though there were some parts that I don’t like, but overall, I love this book.Florentyna was a strong woman. She run her father’s hotel empire. She was a politician. She had everything that she could ask for yet she also had trials in her life that she must overcome. Though she was raised with golden spoon in her mouth, she wasn’t a spoiled brat. When she was dealt with the biggest blow in her pampered life, she had a hard time dealing with it but just like the phoenix, she rose from the ashes.From her triumphs as a student to the White House, this is a very compelling story of a woman who, despite having it all, still suffered from the trials that came her way and how she rose from it all.
Kalgi
The Prodigal Daughter focuses on the life of Florentyna Rosnovski Kane, the daughter of a Polish immigrant who lived the American dream. The first half of this book is a retelling of events from Kane and Abel. The reader gains a few new insights seeing things through Florentyna’s eyes, but these were rare because so many passages were completely lifted from the original book and put into this sequel. One element that seemed to be missing in this book compared to Kane and Abel was the tension and plot twists that came about from the bitter feud between the Kane and Rosnovski patriarchs. These two strong wills really made the first book shine, whereas the summary retelling in this book was a bit disappointing. The latter half of the book deals with Florentyna’s life in politics. I found this to be rather dry at times, and somewhat predictable as to where Florentyna would eventually end up. If I had read The Prodigal Daughter as a stand-alone book, my review would likely have been higher, but it seemed cheap and lazy to reuse so much material from the first book.
aashna
So this was definitely better than it prequel, perhaps, more because of the representation of an empowered woman and less because of the romantic touch in the story, contrary to what I believed before. I realised that this book had more of an impact on me because of the idea that it was a story of a woman, not one who has been stepped over and is ready to snap at society but one who was built, from the time when she was young, to lead, to stand up for what she believed. A woman not driven by her circumstances but by her passion and good will!
Kahaan
I read Kane and Abel a few months ago, after years of debating if I wanted to read Archer. I finally did (more than a decade after seeing it on the BBC Big Read Top 100), and loved it. I soon after discovered there was a sequel, concentrating on a protagonist’s daughter and her rise to power. I genuinely didn’t see a very sad part coming, and as the years rolled by the deaths mounted up, though Archer wasn’t very talented at showing the time passing, no real dates written into the story, but lots of exposition and description. At times it feels like a whistle-stop tour of a life, with occasional stops at key moments for a scene of dialogue before back on the time-train to whizz through to the next segment. It meant a life of 60 years was covered in 480 pages, but it did also mean it’s heavy on the reporting of the story rather than the reader getting to see the characters talking and enacting their lives. It worked, but I’m not convinced it couldn’t have been told differently. But who I am to judge? I’m not a published author.It ends at the right point though, but I did want to know what happened to Florentyna’s daughter, earlier a little ‘wayward’, never really followed through with as an adult. We know about the son, the friends, but not Annabel. A final nod to her father would also have been fitting, but surprisingly that didn’t happen.So a 4 star read from me, not 5. Loved continuing with the characters and seeing American politics (not too in-depth) from the inside.