Hemingway's Girl

By Erika Robuck

Book Overview

From the bestselling author of The House of Hawthorne comes a historical fiction novel that gives life to the women behind novelist Ernest Hemingway in a "robust, tender story of love, grief, and survival on Key West in the 1930s."* In Depression-era Key West, Mariella Bennet, the daughter of an American fisherman and a Cuban woman, knows hunger. Her struggle to support her family following her father's death leads her to a bar and bordello, where she bets on a risky boxing match...and attracts the interest of two men: world-famous writer, Ernest Hemingway, and Gavin Murray, one of the WWI veterans who are laboring to build the Overseas Highway. When Mariella is hired as a maid by Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, she enters a rarified world of lavish, celebrity-filled dinner parties and elaborate off-island excursions. As she becomes caught up in the tensions and excesses of the Hemingway household, the attentions of the larger-than-life writer become a dangerous temptation...even as straightforward Gavin Murray draws her back to what matters most. Will she cross an invisible line with the volatile Hemingway, or find a way to claim her own dreams? As a massive hurricane bears down on Key West, Mariella faces some harsh truths...and the possibility of losing everything she loves.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451237889
• ISBN13: 9780451237880
• Release Date: September 2012
• Publisher: Berkley Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Don't wait... you'll thank me.

I had already read one of her books and I liked her style. However, because it was not in the WWII historic novel genre that I was hooked on, I left this one on my shelf for a long time before reading it. Ironically, it was the cover that made me buy it, but it is the writing of Erika Robuck that assures I will read it again one day. This story shows the reader the dichotomies of wealth and poverty and of loneliness and love in the lives of these characters. They are well written, believable, and easy to care about. In fact, Hemingway, (while of course central to the storyline) is not the only one whose life arc the reader comes to care about. It feels like this could have been a true story from Hemingway's infamous womanizing and yet the story makes him so human and so much like any of us (sort of) that you can't help but root for him, even though most will already know how his story ends before they start. It is how the other characters' endings play out that makes this well worth the read.