REVIEW: The Big House
The Big House: Helena McEwen (Bloomsbury, 2000)
I very much admired Invisible River, therefore I got this book and it was next on my ‘To read’ pile, but when I started it, I was regretting not skipping it, because it opens with the narrator as a grieving woman. She’s at the big house of the title, on the verge of selling it, and the bulk of the novel is her memories of a year from her childhood there. It’s bookended by a brief return to the present.
Given everything that’s going on, I was not in the mood for literary fiction, where there is no plot, about what seemed to be a family with serious mental ill-health, as you can imagine. Fortunately, the childhood section is much more successful and balanced. ( Read more... )
I very much admired Invisible River, therefore I got this book and it was next on my ‘To read’ pile, but when I started it, I was regretting not skipping it, because it opens with the narrator as a grieving woman. She’s at the big house of the title, on the verge of selling it, and the bulk of the novel is her memories of a year from her childhood there. It’s bookended by a brief return to the present.
Given everything that’s going on, I was not in the mood for literary fiction, where there is no plot, about what seemed to be a family with serious mental ill-health, as you can imagine. Fortunately, the childhood section is much more successful and balanced. ( Read more... )