Review: An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew

An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew by Annejet van der Zijl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title of this book would be more appropriate as "The Many Loves of Allene Tew." This book is more about the people that surrounded Allene than it is about herself. Through most of the book, Allene is a secondary character. Allene Tew was a young woman from the late 19th century who came from a pioneering family and married into a higher social status. Although her first husband was from a wealthy family, he was not highly regarded and less so once he married the young woman from the country. Her husband Tod Hostetter was the first in a long line of husbands. Each marriage seemed to edit her social status, not always for the better and she eventually wed a Dutch prince and a German count. She suffered some tragedies in life but also found sources of great love and strength.

I wanted to like this book but I felt that Tew was a very one-dimensional character. I never felt that we truly got to know her. Most of the book was dedicated to the men in her lives, giving the reader great details of their rise and fall in society. The book also seemed to be more of a history lesson on life during the periods that Tew lived. This information was at times very elementary and even repetitive. The reader learned more than once that John Jacob Astor died on the Titanic.

Although this was a non-fiction book, I think it would have been more enjoyable as a historical fiction story and the author could have envisioned Tew's character and thoughts. The way the book came across was more of "here's the facts." Tew did this and then did this based on newspaper articles and genealogical records. I do wonder how much of the flatness of the story and the elementary discourse was due to the translation from Dutch to English.

All in all, the information was interesting but the overall story just seemed to drag on with the minutia of detail on everyone and everything except Allene Tew. Perhaps the story is more interesting in its native language, but I suspect it comes across the same. This would be a good book for someone not familiar with the Gilded Age through World War I.

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