Review by Booklist Review
Siblings Harriet, Alice, Fran, and Roland gather at their grandparents' ramshackle house deep in the English countryside for three weeks, ostensibly to decide what to do with it, now that their parents are gone. More than the site of an occasional family retreat, the old house is where their mother brought them when her marriage to their father was failing. Now, Roland is there with his new wife and teenage daughter, joined by Fran and her two precocious children, while Alice appears with the college-age son of a former lover. Only Harriet arrives alone, though ghosts and shadows accompany her just as surely as any flesh-and-blood partner. It's close quarters at the isolated homestead, a veritable petri dish of regret and desire, recrimination and retaliation, all of which bubble up and smolder in dizzying fits of remorse and acceptance. Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley (Clever Girl, 2014), wise and discerning, offers a subtle-yet-bold examination of complex emotional subtexts that have the power to bring kin together or destroy the bonds that would otherwise unite them.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Not much happens in this sixth novel from Hadley (Clever Girl), yet even its most quotidian events seem bathed in meaning and consequence. Set exclusively on the rambling grounds of a crumbling English cottage estate, the story follows four middle-aged siblings as they putter about their deceased grandparents' home for three weeks, deciding whether or not to sell it. Split into three acts-two bookends that take place in the present, and one middle section that flashes back to their dead mother's brief return to the cottage during a tumultuous time in her marriage-the book has the feeling of a disjointed structure. But like her previous works, it's Hadley's ability to probe the quirks of her characters' psyches that makes this novel exceptional. Whether it's the vain second-youngest sibling, Alice, and her habit of overcompensating for her brother's and sisters' inadequacies, or the introverted oldest sibling Hettie, and her secret obsession with her stuffy brother, Roland, and his sophisticated Argentinian wife (his third), Hadley has a knack for exposing each character's most pressing vulnerabilities. Of special note are the scenes involving the teenagers at the house-Roland's 16-year-old daughter, Molly, and Alice's ex-boyfriend's college-age son, Kasim. The lovebirds' blooming infatuation with each other is palpable and awkward; it recalls the epic nature of falling helplessly, giddily in love for the first time. This is familial drama at its best-unabashedly ordinary yet undoubtedly captivating. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With their quaint furniture, vintage linens, seashell collections, and sepia photographs, old country cottages have a definite mystique. So it is with the Crane family cottage, where the now-grown children were raised by their grandparents after their mother died and their father abandoned them and where they regularly return for summer vacations. Accompanied by various partners and offspring are Harriet, the introspective loner; free-spirited Alice; Fran, the wife of a musician; and Roland, the successful academic, who arrives with his stunning new Argentinian wife. While the adults gossip and argue over whether to spend money on the house in need of repair or to sell up and recoup their losses, the children are left to wander the woods and create mischief in a derelict house they find in the forest. The past intrudes upon the present in the revealing middle of the book, an episode in which their dreamy, impractical mother returned home, seeking an escape from her unhappy marriage. VERDICT A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered. A great read whether at the cottage or just dreaming of one. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]-Barbara Love, -formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Four middle-aged siblings reunite at their family home in the English countryside in Hadley's (Clever Girl, 2014, etc.) quietly masterful domestic portrait. They arrive one by one, gathering at the decrepit old house for what may be the last time (memories are one thing; the cost of maintenance is another): Alice first, artistic and sentimental; Fran, frazzled and practical, her two children in tow and her touring musician husband frustratingly absent; Harriet, the eldest, self-contained and dignified; and Roland, the only brother, distant and academic, newly married (for the third time) to an Argentinian lawyer the sisters have yet to meet. When he arrives with his new wife and 16-year-old daughter, Molly, the family is complete, plus one: Alice has brought her ex-boyfriend's college-aged son, Kasim, along, too. Nothing much "happens" in the novel or, at least, not outwardly. The siblings drink tea, they drink gin, they bicker; they mind Fran's children, Ivy and Arthur, watch romance bloom between Molly and Kasim, and allow the question that has brought them togetherwill they sell the house?to be buried under the business of family vacationing: food preparation, child care, swimming. But inwardly, the sisters are in near-constant upheaval. Hadley expertly captures the gentle tragedies of living, losses, and regrets that are at once momentous and too quotidian to mention: aging, the passage of time, the fissures and slights and unspoken disappointments that simmer underneath the surfaces of all families. The melancholy drama here is not external but internal; not in facts or in actions but in thoughts. Broken up into three dreamy sectionstwo in the present and one set in the same house a generation earlierthe novel might seem overly precious if it weren't so bracingly precise. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
