The Lost Prince – Seldon Edwards
3 stars

………spoilers……….



This is a sequel to Seldon Edwards’ convoluted time travel novel, The Little Book]. The first book takes place mostly in fin de siècle Vienna, where five of the principal characters converge in time. As the complex first book ends, the two time traveling characters are dead. Eleanor Putnam has been left with The Little Book which contains irrefutable, formidable knowledge of the future.

This book is entirely Eleanor’s story as she struggles to bring about those events that she knows must happen. Over the years, she develops (historically unlikely) relationships with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, J.P. Morgan, and other well known personalities. There are a few interesting new characters, but for the most part everything that takes place in this book is thoroughly foreshadowed in the first book. Eleanor must struggle through her own peculiar battle with the ideas of free will and determinism. The most gripping part of the story deals with the devastation of World War I and Arnold Esterhazy’s treatment for profound shell shock.

I liked the first book in this series very much. The Little Book was a challenging, complex book, filled with wonderful historical detail. It required the suspension of disbelief that any reader must take into a time travel novel, but the end result was worth the effort. The Lost Prince is a shorter book with an uncomplicated linear timeline, but I struggled to finish it. It is necessary to read the first book to understand anything in The Lost Prince. However, knowledge of the first book removes any suspense regarding the ending of book two. Foreknowledge of the ending made it difficult to meander through philosophical and psychological sidebars that did little to move the plot. This book lacks much of the detailed descriptions of setting that Seldon lavished on Vienna in the first book. I also found myself losing patience with the convenient ‘secret’ relationships that, in both books, resulted in several characters having surprising bloodlines.

I understand there is to be a third book. Publishers do like trilogies. I will probably read it, but I think it is unfortunate. The Little Book worked very well as a single book.
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This novel is a sequel to Selden Edwards’ The Little Book, a tale of a contemporary American who becomes displaced in time in 19th century Vienna. The Lost Prince opens shortly after Eleanor Burden returns from fin de siècle Vienna and begins a personal mission to ensure a future by aligning the early 20th century according to a journal given to her by her grandson. She establishes her personal fortune with the assistance of a young physicist she hires to invest in companies that she appears to have foreknowledge of their success. She convinces a young Austrian aristocrat to come to Boston as an instructor of the local boys’ school who will play a key role in her son’s future. When the young aristocrat returns to Austria to fight for his native country in WWI, Eleanor is not concern since she knows that the will return to Boston. When Eleanor learns that he is killed in the Italian front, her world and assured future is thrown into turmoil. Now Eleanor is left with the question whether or future is predetermined or does free will prevail?

It is evident that this historical novel possesses a sense of verisimilitude as the protagonist encounters early 20th luminaries such as William James, J.P. Morgan, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and experiences historical events such as the sinking of the Titanic, the 1918 Influenza Epidemic and the horrors of WWI. Although one can read this book without reading its prequel, the reader’s understanding would be better if The Little Book was read first.
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I finished reading The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards for my face group and, while I still highly recommend the first book (The Little Book) I don't really recommend the second. First, at 436 pages, it seriously needs some editing. I didn't find this to be a problem in his first outing so, again, I wonder if it was left alone because his first novel was so successful. It's terribly repetitive at times and a decent editor could have lopped off a good 100 pages -- which would have made me much happier! I also didn't think the characters were as fully drawn in this outing, nor did any of them exhibit the passion of the first book.

A great deal of it is set in WWI which, as a rule, I don't much like reading about. (Guess it's still a reaction to my youthful encounter with Johnny Got His Gun.) And while I learned some things about that war that I didn't know and I'm glad to have learned them, I grew really bored and impatient with the book overall.

The second thing the book is full of -- other than the war -- which I keep forgetting about but which I also tired of reading, is Jungian psychology. In the first book there were many, many conversations between the main character and Sigmund Freud; in this one most of the conversations are between a different main character and Carl Jung. Until reading this I'd have to say I really didn't know much about the philosophies of Carl Jung and while I find myself much more in agreement with his approach than with Freud's, and while usually I'm very interested in reading about the subject, this time out I just got sick of it.

I thought it might be my current mood and lack of energy, but all three of us who actually read it felt the same way so, alas, it must be the book. ( )

I was excited to learn Edwards had a new book out because I loved Little Book so very very much, but I waxed doubtful as soon as I realized that it continues the story of, or at least is connected to, the earlier book. I am skeptical about sequels. Not so much with children's books, because I sympathize with kids' need for reassurance with the familiar, but with YA books that milk characters past credibility and especially with adult books because grown-ups should have less tolerance for milking and less need for reassurance.

In 1912, about the end of a romance and return to reality, someone says her coach has turned back into a pumpkin. Did someone bowdlerize the tale before Disney? Maybe Bowdler? The brothers Grimm mention neither pumpkin nor mice nor glass. Ah, not Andrew Lang in the 19th but Charles Perrault in the 17th. Okay.

Finis. As I feared, it's more of a sequel than a stand-alone-but-related work. I don't know how anyone not having read Little Book could be interested in this. For hundreds of pages, it's business transactions and exposition. The characters were supposedly artsy, musical and philosophical, but the author only tells us this. Even traveling through the ravaged Italy and Austria of 1918 wasn't interesting except for one brief bit where everyone is musical together. If you've read The Little Book, you know the Big Reveal; if you haven't, I applaud your stubbornness in reading 400 pages to get to the deus ex machina, anti-climactic reveal.

Furthermore, I now expect a third book with the same characters. Gotta have a trilogy.

Poo. I'm afraid this will tarnish my love of The Little Book, which had none of these flaws.

he Lost Prince continues the story of Selden Edwards' first book, The Little Book. It actually stands very well on it's own, and in fact, I read it first, not realizing it was continuing a saga Edwards had already started. The story is fascinating and richly imagined. It begins as Eleanor Putnam returns to her upper class Boston home from an extended stay in Vienna during the apex of that city's glory, in 1897. Her decidedly unorthodox adventures in Vienna are alluded to, but not detailed at all.

She has been tasked with following instructions which she received in Vienna in a journal that originally belonged to a mysterious older man to whom she had become very close. He claimed, and she believed, that he had come from the future and was giving her advice that would lead to specific outcomes that would benefit her family and an even wider circle of friends and organizations as time goes by. She was even told whom she should marry and she set about arranging the circumstances so that that would indeed happen. It helped that Frank Burden had already expressed interest in marrying her before she had ever gone to Vienna.

Her first duty is to sell a valuable piece of jewelry, which the man had also given her, so that she would have seed money to start a fund which would provide for the financing necessary to do the things she had been tasked to do. Second, she was told the name of the person she should hire to manage the fund she would set up. She was told the name of the fund, and even what company to invest in first.

Of course she had the choice not to follow the prescribed plan, and sometimes experienced a great deal of anxiety as things seemed to be going terribly wrong, but the advice she had received always proved to be the way to go.

Historical characters show up frequently in Eleanor Putnam Burden's life. Her godfather is William James, the leading American thinker, philosopher and psychologist of the day. She had met Dr. Sigmund Freud while she was in Vienna, and was instrumental in bringing him, along with his disciple and fellow psychologist Carl Jung, to the Boston area to lecture. Because her benefactor had told her of the coming disaster of J. Pierpoint Morgan's great ocean-going vessel, the Titanic, she was able to warn him not to take the maiden voyage.

She was also tasked with recruiting Arnauld Esterhazy, one of the young intellectuals she had met while in Vienna, to move to Boston to teach in the prep school that her husband Frank had attended, and that would become the alma mater of her son and grandson, as yet unborn.

In the meantime, Eleanor is continuing to serve as a charming hostess for Frank as he rises in prestige and influence in the world of Boston banking; she is raising two daughters and doing frequent service and charity work, and otherwise functioning as a key player in Boston society.

But when rumors of war in Europe, the prelude to WWI, are heard, Arnauld Esterhazy feels that it is his duty to return to Vienna to serve in the army there. His expectation is that the war will be of short duration and that his responsibilities will lie far from active battle fields. Sadly he has greatly misjudged what will be required of him. As the war winds down, Arnauld is missing and presumed dead. Eleanor is distraught and asks Dr. Freud to verify the report. He gets back to her with the sad news that trusted sources verify that Esterhazy is dead. Eleanor is stunned....the journal from the future has not been wrong about anything, but Esterhazy has not yet had the opportunity to influence her son, much less a grandson, and yet he has died in the awful war!

Eleanor's feelings of tension return over the battle between choice and destiny as she mourns the loss of the esteemed friend and teacher. At last she decides that he simply cannot be dead, and decides to leave her family in Boston and travel to Europe with only her three year old son, hoping against hope that Esterhazy will be found among the survivors who are still in hospitals, many so shell-shocked that they do not know their own names.

Eleanor's confidence and wisdom serve her well as she deals with many long-suffering Europeans in their war-torn countries and some very unsavory characters as well. She meets Esterhazy's parents, learning of his secret past, which is known only to a very few people. She spends more time with Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung who agree to help her in her quest to find Esterhazy.

This story is intricately plotted and has surprising twists along the way. The ugly anti-Semitism that was emerging in 1897 Vienna and was discounted at the time as a mere political strategy,is becoming the horrific reality that no one foresaw. Discussion of music theories, psychological theories and the battle between free will and destiny also keep the reader involved and thinking about a myriad of ideas and their implications, even beyond the rich characters and personalities that we come to know throughout this compelling and memorable book.