The Second Mrs. Astor

I was just in the right mood for reading Shana Abe's romantic The Second Mrs. Astor (#1,058).  It's subtitled A Novel of the Titanic, and of course, everything leads up to that climactic ending.  She survives, he doesn't.

The meat of the story, however, is the mismatched romance between the ultra-wealthy and divorced much older John Jacob Astor IV and seventeen-year-old Madeleine Force.  Although her family is respectable, they do not move in the same heady social circles as the Knickbocker 400 in New York City which the Astors inhabit.  Madeleine, when his interest in her becomes apparent with the press swarming her every move, is roundly snubbed by just about everyone who does constitute society.  If you've watched the social maneuverings of The Gilded Age on TV, you'll have a pretty good idea of what she was up against.  Add in a hostile stepson almost her own age, and a beautiful ex-wife whose influence surrounds her daily to compound her misery.  No wonder she was so eager to pounce on the idea of a winter in the sunny climes of Egypt!  

Colonel Astor is determined to return home from their honeymoon and to his business dealings on board the brand-new luxury liner, the Titanic.  The latter half of the novel deals with that voyage.  When things are obviously taking a deadly turn, the nurse Colonel Astor has engaged to look after Madeleine in her pregnancy insists that they take to the lifeboats.  It's women and children only, so the devoted couple are parted.  Madeleine does make it home safely to New York and gives birth to a son, but that's where the story ends - no follow-ups, or whatever happened to? to round out the picture.  Whatever happened to the second Mrs. Astor herself, for instance?  Her story isn't generally well known, so that was a bit of a disappointment, I think.  I wish we could have simply left them in France before they boarded the doomed ship.

Speaking of pictures, though, I did have to Google the main characters.  Colonel John Jacob Astor looked as he was presented in the novel (the portrait of him mentioned in the book is available online), but I found it terribly confusing that the identical photos were identified as both Ava Willig Astor (the first wife) AND Madeleine Force Astor!  There certainly seemed to have been enough photos of both women to make positive identification clear!  Other than those quibbles, I did enjoy spending time in the Gilded Age myself.