My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“She remembered when Hemingway had planted a banyan at his house and told her its parasitic roots were like human desire. At the time she’d thought it romantic. She hadn’t understood his warning.”
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 the reliable 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.
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I have to admit that I have never read an Ernest Hemingway novel. I have read about him in school, I have seen movies based on his books, but somehow I have never actually read a whole book written by him. Not that I don’t want to, there are novels by him I would love to read, it just never happened. But someday perhaps…
Hemingway's Girl is a sweet story set in Key West, Mariella Bennet is a nineteen-year-old girl who recently lost her father and struggles to take care of her two sisters and her mother who is trying to cope with her husband’s death. To earn more money she starts to work for the Hemingway family and she is from the very start attracted to Ernest Hemingway, who is not only older but also married. So also meets a young ex-soldier named Gavin Murray. And she is torn between the two men.
Love triangles are a very common concept both in books and movies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In this book, it works because I can understand Mariella's struggles. On one hand, she has a safe man, who shares the same dreams as her on her other hand she has a boastful married writer full of vitality and energy.
Personally, I found Hemingway to be the far more interesting character in this book (and in real life) than Gavin, but that just me.
Anyway, If you like historical fiction about real life authors then you will probably enjoy this boo
k!
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