Book Beginning: The Rich are Different by Susan Howatch

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Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author's name.

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YOUR BOOK BEGINNING



MY BOOK BEGINNING

I was in London when I first heard of Dinah Slade. She was broke and looking for a millionaire, while I was rich and looking for a mistress. From the start we were deeply compatible.

-- The Rich are Different by Susan Howatch. This is one of those sprawling, intergenerational sagas that were so popular in the 1970s. I ate them up in Junior High, including this one, although I don't remember anything about the plot now.

Howatch knows how to weave a yarn. This one starts in the 1920s, when the heroine -- a 21-year-old, precocious, bluestocking with a Cambridge degree and a moldering Norfolk mansion -- charms a New York banker into her bed and out of a loan sufficient to pay the debt on her mansion and launch her cosmetics company. I love these big, shaggy stories.