Forced into a marriage of convenience to save her family's estate, blue-blooded Southern belle Diana, coming of age just after World War I, sacrifices everything, including love, to become the wife of a man she cannot abide, until fate intervenes.
...the literary lovechild of William Faulkner and Dominick Dunne ... Reveling in the secrets, mores and society of 20th-century genteel Southern life, The Dying of the Light is a romance, a melodrama and a cautionary tale told with the grandeur and sweep of an epic Hollywood classic.
There will be domestic violence, death on horseback, repressed homosexuality, expressed homosexuality, dreadful poverty, adultery, theft, envy and, above all, enough details about interior decoration to make an Architectural Digest editor scream in ecstasy ... Everyone loves a good soap opera. But watching Goolrick’s real talent and compassion peep through the floorlength drapes of overwriting feels like seeing Dr. Oz behind his curtain ... The theatricality of the truth is more than enough without the added melodrama.
Goolrick’s writing is always lyrical, and even simple lines like 'They tried so hard it broke their hearts,' or 'Love, for him, was archeological, a dig for a treasure he would never find,' are bitterly poetic. Yet stripped to its core, the story is soapy, over-the-top, and plunging toward an inevitable finale. A lurid and ultimately tragic tale revolving around a woman willing to burn her life to the ground.
