Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3614 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Synopsis
This is the reissue of the third volume in the "Wideacre Trilogy", the bestselling novels that launched the career of Philippa Gregory. Meridon, a desolate Romany girl, is determined to escape the hard poverty of her childhood. Riding bareback in a travelling show, while her sister Dandy risks her life on the trapeze, Meridon dedicates herself to freeing them both from danger and want. But Dandy, beautiful, impatient, thieving, grabs too much, too quickly. And Meridon finds herself alone, riding in bitter grief through the rich Sussex farmlands towards a house called Wideacre - which awaits the return of the last of the Laceys. Sweeping, passionate, unique: "Meridon" completes Philippa Gregory's bestselling trilogy which began with "Wideacre" and continued with "The Favoured Child".

Customer Reviews

A happy ending to this depressing trilogy
The final book in the Wideacre trilogy and tells the story of Julia and Richard Lacey's daughter Meridon (Sarah Lacey). Her mother gave her up to travelling gypsies at birth to protect her from the Lacey madness.

After her gypsy sister is killed during a trapeez act by the father of her unborn baby, Meridon is consumed by grief and accidentally discovers Wideacre and her inheritance. She dashes everyones hopes as she wants to farm the land for a profit for herself.

On her deathbed she is tricked out of her inheritance, but somehow finds the strength to live and against all odds win back Wideacre and the man she loves. She is then able to give Wideacre to the poor.

A happy ending to a mostly depressing trilogy.

Disappointing end to the trilogy
This book marks a departure from the first two, and takes Meridon, an abandoned gypsy girl who is secretly the heiress of Wideacre. I found the characteristion and plotting significantly weaker than the other two books and never felt involved with what was happening. I seems to me that Gregory just got bored with the series and was writing to order. The relationship between the characters was never more than superficial and the convenient ending of the heir of Laceys giving the land to a commune and living herself in a common-man's cottage as his lover but not wife was just way too contrived.

I thought the other two books were flawed but interesting, but this one failed to either capture of hold my interest and brought the whole trilogy down with its too neat tying up of all the ends.

book nostalgia
When I think about this book, I feel book nostalgia. It's what you feel after reading the truly great historical fiction, when you've been seduced by the characters and by the intoxicating intrigue of historical fiction. The BUT is that you have to get through the two first books, which are to put plainly quite painfully depressing, so as to really understand what drives the women of Wideacre. Meridon is on a par with Phillippa Gregory's "The Queen's Fool".