Like a Victorian lady daintily lifting her skirts over a mud puddle, Amy Ephron pays a visit to the Cuban revolution of the 1890s. In A Cup of Tea, Ephron created a species of historical fiction that combined the coolly modern with the lushly romantic. She returns to form in White Rose, telling the partially true story of Evangelina Cisneros, a beautiful, spirited teenager who"s been imprisoned for her part in the movement to free Cuba from Spanish rule. Karl Decker is a reporter for the New York Journal--a newspaper whose all-too-appropriate motto is "While others talk... "The Journal" acts." William Randolph Hearst sends Decker on a secret mission to rescue the girl. The plan is to import her to the States as "a symbol of her country"s struggle, the flower of Cuba." Hearst wants to redirect U.S. policy, encouraging greater American support for the revolutionaries and perhaps even an annexation of Cuba. Leaving behind a wife and child in Washington, Decker heads to Havana to plot a daring rescue. He succeeds in freeing Evangelina, and the two fall in love at the very moment she climbs into his arms from her jail cell. "He held her to him for a moment, he felt her breath on his shoulder, her rapid heart beat against his chest." But Ephron"s lovers find themselves star-crossed, as lovers will. The second half of the novel is devoted to the political and marital fall-out of their union. Along the way, the author makes free with grammar and punctuation, opening up her sentences in a lazy, tropical way which will seem poetic to some and annoying to others. To wit: "There was a rope tied to a willow tree in the garden as if a child had used it for a swing and the night jasmine blooming fresh in the air." --Claire Dederer