![]() ![]() ![]() Nannies, cousins, ponies, big family dinners, bickering aunts - where was it all going? I kept thinking of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s much-more-polished The Light Years, which featured similar components, but palpable narrative tension. Mary’s idyllic family vacations at a country house in Somerset occupy nearly half of the book and this is the portion that had me wondering exactly why I kept turning the pages. ![]() Her widowed mother works the man in their household is Uncle Geoff, a very part-time actor. Sometimes I’ve done rather well on my own.īut there are other times when a little bit of outside information makes all the difference to your judgment of a book, and this was the case with Monica Dickens’ Mariana. Mary Shannon is a thin, colorless shrimp of a girl, part of a small household in 1920s London. Sometimes I have missed fundamental literary strategies ( “Oh - it was a parody?”). I have to say that the results have been mixed. I wouldn’t read reviews, or even the introductions to books - I would just read the texts themselves and figure out what I thought of each book. When I started blogging a couple of years ago I had a vague resolution that I would review books naively. ![]()
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