How is this for a tenuous reason to buy a book: Freddie Mercury allegedly bought Tissot's painting of Kathleen Newton titled 'A Type of Beauty', so naturally I had to learn more about the subject! Favourite singers aside, Patricia O'Reilly delivers what it says on the tin - this is the fictionalised biography of Kathleen Kelly Newton, the scandalous Victorian beauty who bagged an illicit lover while on the fishing fleet, took the name of the husband who announced he was divorcing her on their wedding day, gave birth to a love child before shacking up with Jacques Tissot, the famous painter, and living in sin with their own illegitimate son - only to die of consumption in her twenties. I think Freddie might have approved, actually. O'Reilly gets the facts across, with varying degrees of finesse, and creates a sparky character in Kate. Modern readers should be both educated and entertained. ( )