Heroines by Eileen Favorite

On a picturesque acreage near Prairie Bluff, Ill., 13-year-old Penny Entwistle, and her mother, Anne Marie, run a retreat where literary heroines seek temporary refuge from their tragic destinies. Franny Glass, Madame Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara, Catherine Linton and others find respite from their varied crises, but must return to their books eventually and suffer the fate that awaits. Penny, in the first throes of teenage rebellion, has little patience for her mother and the heartbroken or otherwise distraught women Anne Marie refuses to counsel (lest she change the course of their stories). But when a mythical Celtic knight arrives, searching for his lost heroine Deirdre, Penny gets caught up in a web of deception that lands her in the loony bin. While the staff diagnoses her fabulous story as an attempt to deal with the long-ago death of her father, her mother commits Penny as a means of protecting her from peculiar goings-on at the house, and Penny must rely on the very fictional characters her mother favors to help her.

I liked the original premise of the story, heroines who need a break from their story come to a country bed and breakfast. The story takes place in the 1970s and you can see how naive people were back then. We get most of the Anne Marie's & Penny's back story while Penny is is institutionalized. It is heartbreaking as Anne-Marie does nothing to save her daughter and appears so frustratingly passive throughout the story. She seems more like the pothead than her daughter with her inability to deal with situations constructively. Penny, like most confused early adolescent girls, pushes her mother away while craving her attention, while Anne-Marie seems incapable of taking care of anyone but her heroines.

This book almost felt like two books put together so the story just didn't flow well. I'd like to see the author re-write it into two or three books as I think it would be much more satisfying read.