The Glass Painter's Daughter

Fran has returned home to Westminster due to her father’s illness. The two have had a strained relationship and Gwen has been traveling the world as a classical musician. She has to step in to help at his glass shop, Minster Glass, which has been in the family for generations. The shop is being managed by Zac, who has worked loyally at the shop for years, after being given a chance by Fran’s father to turn his life around. They are offered an intriguing commission to repair a shattered angel stained glass window, broken by the bombings of WWII and recently rediscovered. The glass has a connection to the shop and to Fran’s family and she and Zac work hard to put together both its history and its actual physical existence, hoping to find the original drawing to aid their work. Fran also begins a life in town, meeting up with an old friend who now works at a local women’s shelter and encourages her to join the local church choir where Fran meets a potential love interest. Fran also takes on an unlikely apprentice from the shelter. The story alternates between the past history of the angel and the present as the history of both Fran and the angel start to become clear to her and her path forward faces a divide.

After reading most of Rachel Hore's novels I make sure I keep up with her work. I would compare her to Susanna Kearsley and Kate Morton--both are at the top of my author-list.The operation of Minster Glass is unexpectedly passed on to Fran Morrison while her father is in the hospital. She returns to London and assists her father's employee, Zac, in keeping the glass painting business alive. While going through her father's files, Fran unearths a journal kept more than one hundred years before by a young woman named Laura.The Glass Painter's Daughter is a wonderfully written story of two young women, one from the past and one from the present, both living in London. This is a marvelous read with plenty of history, romance, and suspense.

Rachel Hore's books always give me an overall good feeling and I look forward to reading more of her books. The book, at times, lagged a bit but overall the book was very good. I enjoyed the different characters, even those that I did not particularly like. The book had a good flow between the past and the present. I love historical pieces like this and I found the glass painting aspect very interesting. My only wish is that this author had more of her books written in e-books which are much easier for me to read and get my hands on. :-)

I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to reading more from this author. The characters were engaging, it flowed nicely from one timeframe to another and was set in that nice cozy english setting which I particulary enjoy. The background knowledge about stained glass windows I found very interesting and I found myself searching for more information on this subject. A good well written story.

I wasn't too impressed with this book. I've read some of Rachel Hore's others and they were very good. This one seemed to have a lot of story lines both past and present. I lost interest in the stories and forced myself to finish. I was hoping for more history on glass painting. Just so so.

I thought this was a very good book and well written. It kept your interest with a nice little mystery as she tried to trace her fathers life and so discover where she herself belonged. Would reccommend this to anyone.

I liked this book a lot. I think that Rachel Hore is an excellent writer and I will be reading other of her books. The stained glass part of the book was most interesting. I liked the characters and the setting. All in all it was a very good book.

A very well written novel. I have read a few of this authors other books and liked this one the best. The main plot is more defined and there are no loose ends left hanging. All in all, a very enjoyable read!

I've read a couple of her other books and enjoyed them, but this was a very slow and boring storyline.

The setting is the main attraction of this novel. Set in Westminster, London, in a glass artist's shop it is unusual and interesting to learn about how stained glass windows are manufactured. However, I found the main subject of this novel, the romance of the main protagonist and various couples, past and present, both predictable and rather low on character development. The novel was also missing dramatic tensions. We never met, or found out about the woman who did the most damage in the present. Even her victims had very little to say about her. Though the reader is able to connect with the romances of the past, they are very lightly touched upon. In spite of being the foundation of the shop and the connecting link to it, the male character of the 19th century was very sketchily drawn. I cannot recommend this as a light read because of the length. As a diversion it is adequate.

This is almost an amazing novel. The multifaceted and contrasting settings of stained-glass, music and Victorian London are convincing and fascinating. The characters are complicated, fully fleshed and involving. Our heroine's unfolding story has drama, mystery, historical interest and angels. Hey, we all like angels! But, and here is the problem, it also has romance.I have nothing against chic-lit. Read once, enjoy and bin is what the Kindle was made for. But this novel is also about real-life non-romantic love and anguish, drama that entranced me, and so I was surprisingly disappointed to be treated to the "who will she end up with" device like any old pulp fiction. Somehow the mushy stuff is irritating when put along side believable emotional drama. If you do read it (and I recommend you do) try to ignore the cliched romantic story line and concentrate on the other threads of this well woven tale.One minor niggle. The historic part of the story is told through a found Victorian diary. This is introduced with exerts in an authentic voice of the time. But the author lost her nerve or got lazy, and told the rest of the historical story in a modern voice. Maybe it is just me (an avid consumer of real Victorian fiction both good and bad), but that cop-out just diluted the impact.

Banal chick-lit piffle bestrewn with historical inaccuracies and clunking dialogue, The Glass Painter's Daughter left me utterly cold and bored witless. Diabolically unsubtle, the reader is force-fed angelic imagery on, seemingly, every other page as Hore pitifully attempts to add depth and meaning to the bland narrative. Our dopey heroine falls in love at every whipstitch, yet the tale is utterly devoid of passion; kisses bestow an 'amazing tingling feeling', which is about as fulsome as it gets. The names of artists and composers are bandied about in an attempt to imbue the sorry story with a more highbrow air - an attempt which, needless to say, falls flat.An anodyne, syrupy romance which goes nowhere, yet fancies itself as something more. Awful.

This is the first book I have read by Rachel Hore. I will definitely be buying her others.Its difficult to weave past with present as expertly as Rachel has. I was also impressed with her ability to illustrate the difference between infatuation and love. She explores many facets of loss: of ones child through death or divorce, of parent, of health, of possessions and of love. In all, the book was for me, deliciously moreish and unlike many current books, she did tie up all loose ends, bringing the book to a satisfying conclusion.One tiny criticism is that I felt she could have left out the story about her friend Jo and the build up via Jo's mysterious behaviour. It leads us to believe this will fit somewhere into Fran's own story and yet it does not. It seems to sit on its own as a sort of 'flash fiction' - Jo was more or less a background figure - only really needed to introduce Fran to Ben and Amber. Therefore I felt irritated and side tract by her mini story which seemed so insignificant to anything much else going on.