From Publishers Weekly
From a strand of understated Tiffany pearls, bought with Tessa Kent's first earnings as an actress, to the flash of honey-green emeralds slung around her neck by her Aussie mogul husband, Luke Blake, Tessa's gems are the tangible sign of her stardom and power over men. But Krantz (who justifiably claims that this novel "beats with a bigger heart" than her others, most recently Spring Collection) digs beneath the surfaces she unabashedly celebrates and comes up with a few metaphorical diamonds. Chief among them is Maggie, the daughter to whom Tessa gives birth at 14. (In keeping with the contemporary mandate to remind readers that no condomless sex is safe, conception occurs even though young football hero Mark O'Malley doesn't penetrate Tessa's hymen.) Tessa's mother, dour Agnes Hovath, satisfies both her Catholic faith and her ambitions for gorgeous Tessa by bringing up Maggie as her own. Luke is so obsessed with the jewel of Tessa's virginity (surgically restored postpartum) that Tessa does not dare to claim Maggie as her offspring even when her parents are killed in an accident shortly after Tessa and Luke's wedding, hosted by the Rainiers in Monaco. Five-year-old Maggie is raised grudgingly by Luke's ineffectual stepbrother, Tyler, and his money-hungry wife, Madison. Only their son, Barney, cares about Maggie. In one of the novel's best touches, Krantz adroitly charts the gradual progression of the tykes' friendship as it evolves into camaraderie, lust and married love. But it's the relationship between Tessa and Maggie that is the moral proving ground and plot driver of the story. For all the Hollywood dazzle, sexy shenanigans, bobbing balloons of good fortune punctured by the stab of mortality, this is a romance of motherhood in all its full if tarnished glory. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Until Maggie is nearly grown, she thinks that glamorous movie star Tessa is her big sister, but when she learns that Tessa is really her mother, she breaks off relations in a fury. Will Tessa win her daughter back? Only Krantz knows for sure.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
The Jewels of Tessa Kent is a morality tale for our time that will be enjoyed by many millions. Despite my better judgment and my reckless, impetuous, larger-than-life effort not to, I enjoyed it myself.

From AudioFile
From unwed motherhood to movie stardom, Tessa is the classic poor little rich girl–poor in parenting skills and life expectancy; rich in acclaim, lifestyle, and the eponymous baubles. Would that Kate Harper were able to rise above Krantz's stylistic morass in the way that Tessa ultimately gets her life together. Parts of Harper's performance–the depiction of Tessa's martyr mother, for instance–are affecting, but she and Krantz fail to make us take either plot or players seriously. The whole thing seems steeped in bathos. Krantz's many fans shouldn't be deterred; they know what to expect. All others might listen elsewhere or try the abridged version J.B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Teresa Horvath is the only child of an Irish Catholic mother and a Hungarian professor father who have almost nothing in common except their devout faith and their beautiful, talented daughter. At age 14, through a bizarre sexual encounter, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, Maggie, who Teresa's parents raise as their own. At age 16, she is selected for the role of Jo in a new movie version of Little Women, embarking on a career that transforms her into the award-winning international film star Tessa Kent. When she neglects to claim Maggie as her own child after her parents are killed in a car crash returning from her Monte Carlo nuptials to one of the world's richest men, the groundwork is laid for terrible consequences. While Tessa is showered with jewels by her doting husband, Maggie is raised by a cold, unloving family financed by her brother-in-law. After receiving a letter on her eighteenth birthday revealing the fact that her parents were actually her grandparents, and that her adored but distant sister is her mother, Maggie flees to New York City and enters the world of high-end auctions. Like her mother, she turns out to be lucky in love, rich in friendships, and enormously successful. Krantz, the reigning queen of glitz-and-glamour romance, takes her readers on a compelling and enjoyable trek through the worlds of precious-jewelry collecting, elegant auction houses, and the international jet-set scene, imparting tidbits of fascinating information along the way and presenting a remarkably likable cast of good-hearted characters. Diana Tixier Herald

Book Description
Make it easy on yourself, read Judith Krantz in Large Print

* All Random House Large Print Editions are published in a 16-point typeface



For the first time Judith Krantz has chosen to tell a story rooted in the shattering emotions of a mother-daughter relationship gone desperately wrong. The story unfolds on a classic Krantz background, a magic carpet of gorgeous entertainment and sumptuous events. Yet, at its core, The Jewels of Tessa Kent is an engrossing, deeply moving, and ultimately inspiring tale of two women bound by blood yet torn apart by their deepest emotions.

Tessa Kent, an exquisite and precocious fourteen, gives birth to an illegitimate daughter. Her parents, devout Catholics, raise the infant, Maggie, as their own child. At sixteen Tessa is discovered by Hollywood; by nineteen she's an international movie star. Maggie lives for her glorious "sister's" infrequent whirlwind visits. Maggie is a captivating, independent eighteen when she accidentally learns the truth. Mortally wounded, she breaks all ties with Tessa and starts to work at the famed Manhattan auction house of Scott & Scott.

Five years later, a life-altering crisis makes Tessa passionately determined to end this estrangement. An auction is the only way she can find to reach her daughter, an auction of the immensely valuable collection of famed jewels that represent all the love lavished on her by her late husband. Tessa promises Scott & Scott the auction on the condition that Maggie and she work closely together on the sale. For Tessa, her entire future now hangs on the hope of an almost impossible reconciliation.

The Jewels of Tessa Kent deals with the fascinating workings of an auction house; it's a revealing look at the inside of Hollywood stardom; but more than anything else, it's a story of feelings and family, of loss, mistakes, joy and redemption.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher
For years I've been resisting the temptation to read one of those blockbusters by Judith Krantz until finally, I couldn't wait any longer. And now I've just finished "The Jewels of Tessa Kent," Ms. Krantz's latest novel, and there's a tear in my eye (despite my effort at world-weary self-control) at the blissful star-crossed passion of it all.But let me be frank. I feel jealous, yes jealous, at the ease with which Ms. Krantz seemed to spin out her tale of the ultra-glamorous, the ultra rich and the ultra-tragic. And I feel relief as well, relief that, at long last, I have relinquished, if only briefly, my claim on highbrow culture, and have experienced total immersion in sudsy, perfumed, tumescent melodrama."The Jewels of Tessa Kent" is a morality tale for our time that will be enjoyed by many millions. Despite my better judgement and my reckless, impetuous, larger-than-life effort not to, I enjoyed it myself.
--from The New York Times reviewed by Richard Bernstein 11/30/98

From the Inside Flap
Make it easy on yourself, read Judith Krantz in Large Print

* All Random House Large Print Editions are published in a 16-point typeface



For the first time Judith Krantz has chosen to tell a story rooted in the shattering emotions of a mother-daughter relationship gone desperately wrong. The story unfolds on a classic Krantz background, a magic carpet of gorgeous entertainment and sumptuous events. Yet, at its core, The Jewels of Tessa Kent is an engrossing, deeply moving, and ultimately inspiring tale of two women bound by blood yet torn apart by their deepest emotions.

Tessa Kent, an exquisite and precocious fourteen, gives birth to an illegitimate daughter. Her parents, devout Catholics, raise the infant, Maggie, as their own child. At sixteen Tessa is discovered by Hollywood; by nineteen she's an international movie star. Maggie lives for her glorious "sister's" infrequent whirlwind visits. Maggie is a captivating, independent eighteen when she accidentally learns the truth. Mortally wounded, she breaks all ties with Tessa and starts to work at the famed Manhattan auction house of Scott & Scott.

Five years later, a life-altering crisis makes Tessa passionately determined to end this estrangement. An auction is the only way she can find to reach her daughter, an auction of the immensely valuable collection of famed jewels that represent all the love lavished on her by her late husband. Tessa promises Scott & Scott the auction on the condition that Maggie and she work closely together on the sale. For Tessa, her entire future now hangs on the hope of an almost impossible reconciliation.

The Jewels of Tessa Kent deals with the fascinating workings of an auction house; it's a revealing look at the inside of Hollywood stardom; but more than anything else, it's a story of feelings and family, of loss, mistakes, joy and redemption.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Since the publication of her first novel, Scruples, Judith Krantz has been one of the world's best-selling novelists. Born and raised in New York City and a graduate of Wellesley College, she and her husband, Steve Krantz, live in Bel Air and Newport Beach, California. They have two sons and two grandchildren.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Agnes Patricia Riley Horvath, whose daughter, Teresa, would become Tessa Kent, lay in bed at three in the morning. She had been awakened, as usual, by obsessive, angry thoughts about her husband, Sandor, and the way in which he dominated the upbringing of their only child, who now, in August 1967, had reached the age of twelve.

Her parents had opposed her marriage to Sandor Horvath in 1954 and they had been right, Agnes told herself. She was humiliated to the marrow of her bones as she relived her folly, lying next to Sandor in those private hours during which she was unable to keep her mind under control.

If it weren't for Sandor's stern prohibitions, Agnes reflected furiously, Teresa would be well launched on her career, a career about which there wasn't the smallest question-- destiny Agnes knew to be as fixed as the rotation of the earth.
Her daughter had been born a star--yes a star!--by virtue of her extraordinary beauty and the unmistakable dramatic talent she'd exhibited even as a small child. That wasn't a mere mother's pride talking, that was the opinion of everyone who'd ever seen her, Agnes told herself, trembling with frustration. Teresa should be making movies, or at the very least commercials--there was no limit to her future. But no, her husband, unable to move away from his rigid, old-fashioned, European ideas of what was correct and proper for a young girl, had steadily refused to let her take the girl to New York, where she could meet the influential people who would recognize how exceptional her daughter was.

Night after night, Agnes Horvath asked herself what had possessed her, when she was a mere eighteen and far too stupid to make choices, to insist on marrying a man who was essentially foreign to the tight-knit, devout, Irish Catholic world in which she had her enviable place as the youngest of the five sparkling, black-haired, blue-eyed Riley daughters. Why had she set her heart on a refugee from Communist Hungary, a music professor of thirty-five?

Each time Agnes asked herself this question, she couldn't stop herself from treating it as if it were a newly discovered problem that might contain some newly meaningful answer. She'd recapitulate the past as seriously as if she might still uncover some forgotten fact that would suddenly change the present.

Sandor had been an amazingly handsome man, a charming and romantic stranger, who had swept the provincial fool she had been off her feet and out of what small, unsophisticated wits she had possessed. The distinguished man who spoke English with more elegance and precision than any American boy had been irresistible to her barely formed mind and impressionable heart. Savagely Agnes reminded herself that she'd also been suffering from a bad case of seeing Gone with the Wind too many times. Then, and still today, at forty-eight, Sandor strongly resembled Leslie Howard, but she'd been too immature to realize how quickly his fine-boned, intellectual, sensitive beauty would become infuriating when she weighed them against the rules and regulations he imposed on her.

Now she was thirty-one, her marriage was thirteen years old, and Agnes Horvath had known for at least half of it that she'd made the biggest mistake a deeply religious Catholic woman could make. No matter how great her rage against her husband, there could be no thought of divorce. But even if the mere idea of divorce had not been a sin, what training did she have to make a living for herself and Teresa if they were to find themselves on their own? Agnes Riley had been brought up to be a protected wife and a devoted mother, nothing more, and certainly nothing less, like every other woman of her generation.

Sandor earned a good salary as the head of the music department at an exclusive girls school in Stamford, Connecticut, not far from their home on the modest edge of the rich community of Greenwich, where they lived in order to be near their daughter's school. Teresa was a day student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an aristocratic institution which they were both intent on her attending.

In all fairness, Agnes reminded herself, turning over in bed, she had to admit that Sandor worked hard to make his way in his new country. Her sisters had married local boys in nearby Bridgeport, where she'd grown up, mates whose status never came close to that of a professor. Some of these good Irish-American boys made considerably more money than Sandor in their blue-collar jobs, but the whole family respected her elegant, learned husband.

Each of Agnes's sisters had produced a sprawling brood of kids, ordinary, unremarkable, almost indistinguishable kids. When she took Teresa to their frequent family gatherings there was no doubt about whose child, among the dozens of cousins, was the center of attention. Teresa's singularity was a subject of family pride rather than any sniping or competition. From the time she was a tiny baby she had so fine and rare a quality that a party would have been incomplete without Teresa to marvel at. Her own sisters, Agnes knew, were in awe of the child she'd brought into their limited world. Her cousins vied for her attention, the older ones whisking her away so they could play with her as if she were some very precious kind of doll.

Teresa was the only one of the cousins who didn't attend a local parochial school. At the Convent, one of the many Sacred Heart schools in the world, she was a "Day Hop," not a boarding student. Many daughters of millionaires were her classmates, a distinction that only added to Teresa's exhalted position in the Riley family.

"Your family will ruin her utterly with all that attention," Sandor had grumbled angrily after the last Riley get-together. "Teresa's becoming spoiled. She used to be such a satisfactory child, docile and obedient, but lately, I warn you, Agnes, I sense that there's something going on inside her that I worry about...some sort of rebellion under the surface, something I can't put my finger on. And I most definitely don't approve of that 'best friend' of hers, that Mimi Peterson. She's not a child I want Teresa associating with, she's not even a Catholic, heaven knows what ideas she's putting--"

"You're imagining things," Agnes had snapped. "Every little girl has a best friend, and the Petersons are lovely, suitable people. They may be Protestants but they have the good sense to realize that the quality of education at Sacred Heart is better than that at an ordinary school. And they truly appreciate Teresa, which is more than her own father seems to do."

"How can you say something so unfair?" he demanded, stung. "I love her too much for my own good, but, Agnes, the world's a difficult place and Teresa's not a princess, whatever you may think. She doesn't need any more fuss made about her than she already gets from you. The way you dote on her is shameless...it comes close to the sin of pride, if you ask me."

"Sandor!"

"Pride, Agnes, is too high an opinion of oneself."

"Do you imagine I don't know that?" she asked, outraged. She loathed his tone when he started to talk church doctrine, as sanctimonious, stuffy and hair splitting as if he'd lived hundreds of years ago.

"Too high an opinion of one's offspring, can, like pride, lead to the sin of presumption."

"When I need a priest's interpretation of sin, Sandor, I know where to go for it. How dare you preach to me?"

"Agnes, but you realize that in less than a year Teresa will be a teenager? I've seen your sisters go through enough trouble with their own teenaged children, why should we be different? If only..."

"If only we'd had more children? Don't you dare, Sandor! I wanted them as much as you did. Are you saying it was my fault that I had those miscarriages...?"

"Agnes, you can't possibly be starting this nonsense again, please, I beg you. I was going to say that if only it were ten years ago life would be simpler, if only there were standards...if only people stayed the same! In my country teenagers behaved like the school children they are. Please stop talking about fault. The Blessed Virgin didn't mean it to be, and we must accept that."

But he did blame her, Agnes Horvath brooded angrily, he blamed her in his heart of hearts, but never as much as she blamed herself, no matter how ridiculous and futile and morally wrong she knew it was to use the word "blame" about a situation that was in the hands of God alone.

But at least she had Teresa, and wasn't one Teresa worth a houseful of ordinary children?


From the Paperback edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Tessa Kent, an exquisite and precocious fourteen, gives birth to an illegitimate daughter. Her parents, devout Catholics, raise the infant, Maggie, as their own child. At sixteen Tessa is discovered by Hollywood; by nineteen she's an international move star. Maggie lives for her glorious "sister's" infrequent whirlwind visits. Maggie is a captivating, independent eighteen when she accidentally learns the truth. Mortally wounded, she breaks all ties with Tessa and starts to work at the famed Manhattan auction house of Scott & Scott. Five years later, a life-altering crisis makes Tessa passionately determined to end this estrangement. An auction is the only way she can find to reach her daughter, an auction of the immensely valuable collection of famed jewels that represent all the love lavished on her by her late husband. Tessa promises Scott & Scott the auction on the condition that Maggie and she work closely together on the sale. For Tessa, her entire future now hangs on the hope of an almost impossible reconciliation.

SYNOPSIS

In Krantz's latest drama, a young girl discovers a disturbing secret: Her sister, movie star Tessa Kent, is actually her mother.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Bernstein - New York Times

. . .[H]ere comes the critical admission of a lifetime — I kind of liked it. . . .The Jewels of Tessa Kent is a morality tale for our time. . . .Despite my better judgment and my reckless, impetuous, larger-than-life effort not to, I enjoyed it myself.

Cynthia Sanz

. . .[P]acks plenty of the shameless name-dropping and over-the-top glitz that helped put her previous efforts. . .on bestseller lists. —People Magazine

Vanessa V. Friedman

A Judith Krantz book can be as reassuringly familiar as an old blanket. . . .This time,Ms. Krantz's blanket is starting to fray along the edges. —Entertainment Weekly

Publishers Weekly

From a strand of understated Tiffany pearls, bought with Tessa Kent's first earnings as an actress, to the flash of honey-green emeralds slung around her neck by her Aussie mogul husband, Luke Blake, Tessa's gems are the tangible sign of her stardom and power over men. But Krantz (who justifiably claims that this novel "beats with a bigger heart" than her others, most recently Spring Collection) digs beneath the surfaces she unabashedly celebrates and comes up with a few metaphorical diamonds. Chief among them is Maggie, the daughter to whom Tessa gives birth at 14. (In keeping with the contemporary mandate to remind readers that no condomless sex is safe, conception occurs even though young football hero Mark O'Malley doesn't penetrate Tessa's hymen.) Tessa's mother, dour Agnes Hovath, satisfies both her Catholic faith and her ambitions for gorgeous Tessa by bringing up Maggie as her own. Luke is so obsessed with the jewel of Tessa's virginity (surgically restored postpartum) that Tessa does not dare to claim Maggie as her offspring even when her parents are killed in an accident shortly after Tessa and Luke's wedding, hosted by the Rainiers in Monaco. Five-year-old Maggie is raised grudgingly by Luke's ineffectual stepbrother, Tyler, and his money-hungry wife, Madison. Only their son, Barney, cares about Maggie. In one of the novel's best touches, Krantz adroitly charts the gradual progression of the tykes' friendship as it evolves into camaraderie, lust and married love. But it's the relationship between Tessa and Maggie that is the moral proving ground and plot driver of the story. For all the Hollywood dazzle, sexy shenanigans, bobbing balloons of good fortune punctured by the stab of mortality, this is a romance of motherhood in all its full if tarnished glory. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections. (Nov.)

Library Journal