Well, with a title like that, one would expect it to either be a bodice-ripping romance or a horror book. This book is neither.<\/p>\n
It deals with a recent British widow who decides after her husband’s sudden death to move to a small cottage in the British countryside. She does so and discovers its environs are mostly owned by a land-grabber who has a number of ruffians about. There’s also a faded writer nearby. She moves in, deals a bit with her two children, and then engages a handyman to do a little work on her cottage.<\/p>\n
Well, the handyman is a louse, ultimately, and his lousiness triggers a change in the widow and her son, and the characters move on that event. The book ends in tragedy, though, which saddened me, and the author goes for the Nausea<\/i> ending:<\/p>\n A memorial, then, to both of them, extinct as they are, foolish, fond, courageous and insignificant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is, in spite of the meaninglessness, the writer character decides to tell the idiot’s tale for us. Marvelous.<\/p>\n I’m probably a better person, slightly, for going outside the normal comforts of genre fiction. The book isn’t a bad read, although a trifle slow and slightly alien for a middle-aged American male.<\/p>\n