"But aren’t all great quests folly?" -Jess Walters

Jess Walters' new novel Beautiful Ruins ties the past to the present by weaving a young Italian hotel owner's crush on a beautiful, dying 1960s American film actress with a washed up producer Michael Deane's final quest to do good. I will admit, I never read romance, but this novel caught me off guard. I didn't realize I was reading a romance until I was 3/4 done! The characters were vibrant, funny, and flawed, and there's something about experiencing the behind-the-scenes of a film set that makes me feel like a spy.

This novel takes place during the filming of Elizabeth  Taylor's 1963 movie Cleopatra.  In attempt to cool Liz Taylor's (she played Cleo) love affair with Richard Burton (he played Antony, see right) the movie's producer (Michael Deane)  stows Burton's other lover, Dee Moray, in a small hotel in a nearby Italian fishing village. Deane's plan is that Burton will be forced leave the film set (and thus, Taylor) to find Dee, who is "dying."(You can probably guess what's actually wrong with her, given it's 1963 and whenever a young woman disappears, it usually means she's suffering from just one kind of perfectly natural "ailment.")

But 50 years later, when Pasquale, the now elderly hotel owner, shows up in Michael Deane's office in Hollywood with a plan to find Dee, an unlikely group of film addicts band together to find the once-dying actress.

And like all good romances, the ending is happily ever after.  But man, I rarely read this kind of "fluff," and while I suppose this was better than average fluff, Walters attempts to appease the literary types and throws in a couple of references to the greats, like this quote from Kundera, which seems to easily sum up the novel's theme: "There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact."Too often we're concerned with the past or the future, and miss our present opportunities completely. While the characters of the novel seem to have learned this lesson, they are powerless to revise its paradox.

Maybe I'm just ready for summer and needed a beach read sans the beach (there was frost this morning). Nonetheless, I would recommend this to all you romance readers out there, but I'm off to find something a little more gritty and realistic.