Wild Lily by K. M. Peyton (review)

It’s 1921, and thirteen-year-old Lily pines after fifteen-year-old Antony, a crush that will go unrequited for the next seventy years. In Lily’s small English town, it’s a known fact that common and plain Lily will never be matched to the handsome heir to the Lockwood Hall estate, but when he wants someone to accompany him on his newly purchased two-seater to prove he’s a great pilot (he isn’t) to his friends, she happily volunteers; when he helps his crooked father flee the officials, Lily covers for him; when he needs a place to stash his family’s valuables before running off, Lily offers up her house. Finally, years later and years apart, when he, at death’s door, needs someone to take care of his infant daughter, Lily reverently takes the child, despite being married and having three other children. This British import by noted author Peyton has the feel of black and white films from the early twentieth century, filled with melodrama, exhortations, starry-eyed leads, and doomed romances. The cinematic flair doesn’t translate here, though: the exclamation-peppered dialogue is silly instead of emotive, the exposition is broad and labored, and the focalization jumps between Lily and Antony in a frustratingly disorienting way. Lily and Antony are simply unlikable: Antony never repents for his many misdeeds, and his gifting of the baby to Lily by no means redeems him, though the book seems to present it as so. Lily’s character wholly relies on her relation to Antony and she shrinks further into a trope as the story moves along. Readers looking for historical fiction laced with drama and tragedy would be better served by Peyton’s classic Flambards books or a trawl through Downton Abbey.