[Below, Yolen offers an unfavorable review of The Ladies of Missalonghi.]

Colleen McCullough's new novel, The Ladies of Missalonghi makes the mistake of confusing the inevitability of fairy-tale logic with predictability, of confusing the accuracy of an account with textbook prose.

The short novel has fairy-tale antecedents—most notably Cinderella—visible in the heroine, Missy Wright, a girl whose real beauty is hidden behind a wardrobe of brown dresses and whose patrimony has been stolen from her by her wicked cousins. There is a handsome rich man, as close to a prince as Australia could produce, who chooses Missy above all the others. And a fairy godmother in the form of a beautiful, glowing woman named Una, who is ultimately revealed as an angel.

The book tries hard to portray Australia and the Australian mind accurately in the years just before World War I with occasional outbursts of leaden prose: "That they acquiesced so tamely to a regimen and a code inflicted upon them by people who had no idea of the loneliness, the bitter suffering of genteel poverty, was no evidence of lack of spirit or lack of courage. Simply, they were born and lived in a time before the great wars completed the industrial revolution, when paid work and its train of comforts were a treason to their concepts of life, of family, of femininity." A perfectly acceptable sentence for a history or sociology text, but hardly the kind of prose that sings in fiction.

In fact, the studied, ornate, empty prose echoes the studied, ornate, empty life that so many of the women of the period suffered through. But it is lucky for the reader that The Ladies of Missalonghi is novella length, a quick 189 pages plus several undistinguished line drawings by Peter Chapman, for that prose would wear down even the most ardent readers of romantic fiction or Colleen McCullough's many fans.

In her previous novels, Ms. McCullough showed herself to be a wonderful storyteller, with a gift for breezy characterizations and tales that galloped across the pages of her books. In Tim or The Thorn Birds one would never come across a sentence like this: "Answering the lure of the valley, she crossed to the far side of Gordon Road and lifted her face to the kindly sky and swelled her nostrils to take in the heady tang of the bush." Swelled her nostrils? Yes, The Ladies of Missalonghi is meant to be, in part, a gentle, genteel parody of the romantic novels that Missy reads. But fairy tale, text-book, romance, and parody do not sit well side by side. The Ladies of Missalonghi is a strange, silly bit of froth that tries to straddle too many genres and ends up simply being annoying.