White Magic

by Faith Baldwin

White Magic by Faith Baldwin in Hardcover.

Genres: Romance

305 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Dana Natwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

boom baby. I feel better already. okay, on to the next heavy book.

[Nick Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Romantic intrigue swirls about like the snow in the book’s Sun Valley setting.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Faith Baldwin titles go, White Magic is far from one of my favorites. The story felt too much as if the author picked the location--Sun Valley, Idaho--and then tried to tailor a story to it, rather than the location growing organically out of the characters and their stories. There was also an unfocused, change-partners quality to the story that left me wondering what romance I was supposed to be rooting for. About 60 percent of the way through the story, it finally became clear what we were meant to be hoping for, but by then, it was a little late. Not a bad book, just not a particularly good one.