Slave to Love

by Rebecca Campbell

Campbell has created a gothic tale filled with dark overtones and overly dramatic characters who are balanced by fey Alice and her very modern friends in their search for love. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081297090X
• ISBN13: 9780812970906
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Villard Books
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful and witty

I loved this book. It's marketed and packaged to look like a chick lit book but it was so much deeper and wittier than any other chick lit book I've read out there. It was a pleasure to have to pay attention to every word on the page lest I miss the humorous descriptions, insults and thoughts the characters throw at each other. This is so far above the "Devil Wears Prada" and "Nanny Diaries" genre. The plot follows Alice, a lovely, somewhat lost intellectual working at an auction house. There's Andrew, another intellectual who loves her, Lynden, the landed gentry who wants to auction his copy of Audubon's work, who also loves her. So a little love triangle there, which are always fun. Oh, and the Dead Boy, whose love is or is not a figment of Alice's imagination, and is something she needs to work through in the book. Alice and Andrew share a work space so we get to meet the various losers and schemers in the auction house, as well as sharing loyal friends Odette and Leo. I think this would make a great, fun movie. If you want a really really interesting, funny, entertaining and satisfying book, I heartily recommend Slave to Love. I'll miss Alice and Andrew now that the book is over.

weird and wonderful

This is such a strange book. I was expecting something fun from the cover, and there is quite a lot of fun along the way, but this is actually something darker and more mysterious than the usual brit chick lit. It's about a girl who works for an auction house, and there's all the usual office romance stuff, but then she sees something terrible happen and she turns kind of loopy, and the novel changes tone. There's a heartrending scene set in Bosnia, and what reads like a Jane Austen pastiche of romantic fiction and about twelve other strands and styles. it ought to be a mess, and in some ways it is, but yet it somehow unites everything into what i think just might be a masterpiece. Sorry if this is incoherent, but this book has done something very peculiar to my head. Overall I loved it. Loved it to death.

So nice I bought it twice

Well, I must have known I'd love this book because I accidentally bought it twice (under the British title and the US title!) While I'm not sure that it's good enough to pay full fare twice, it's surely worth buying once! It's so hard to convey how special this book is. Rebecca Campbell has a truly quirky style, a real gift in a world of solid-but-conventional authors or (more likely) mediocre writers who write to a formula. There are a handful of wonderful and creative - but not bizarre - authors, and she's quickly joining their ranks. The story is, on the surface, about Alice, a science books expert at a minor (but trying!) auction house in London. But the story is as much about those in Alice's life as it is about her - including the Dead Boy. (Literally, a boy she saw killed in a pedestrian/car accident, whom she falls in love with.) Campbell takes a story line that could either be preposterous or weighty and makes it a page turner. There's lots of humor, but there's a deep undercurrent as well. My only complaint (and I'm sure that's more a sign of my age, not the author's talent) is that the language is "rough" (profanity) in spots (including a passage that is devoted to my least favorite word in the English language). Yet the writing is never rough, her gift with dialog is superb and this book is not to be missed by the fans of contemporary fiction. (Note, this is not a book for chicks only - it's really a wonderful novel for anyone.)

Planning to read more by this author

I bought this book at the airport, expecting (from the cover) a sort of skinny, bookish Bridget Jones. However, this novel was far more thoughtful than I expected, and it genuinely surprised me at least two or three different times. Alice is something of an intellectual dreamer, who sees the beauty and order in science. She abandons her dreams, however, to take a job in an auction house so she can support her bitter mother. Andrew, Alice's co-worker, is immediately drawn to her, but must witness her emotional involvement with first a "Dead Boy" (I'll leave you to find out what that means) and then a rich aristocrat looking to auction off his very valuable Audobon folio. The characters in this book are sometimes overly dramatic, but several of them learn to laugh at, or at least recognize, their own melodramatic tendencies. The writing is wonderful, and there are two consecutive chapters in the book (about the Dead Boy) that by themselves would make a brilliant standalone short story. The details of the world of rare book auctions are also very interesting. My only reservation is that some of the minor office characters are difficult to keep straight, and some of the office politics too subtle for me to understand their significance. However, I will gladly seek out this author's other work. Overall, this novel achieves an unusual combination of light entertainment and thoughtful fiction.