Turning for Home

Rating:
Summary: Characters Come to Life
Review: This was a sweet, heart-tugging book with a memorable and well-developed cast of characters of many different types. It takes place mainly in a small rural village in the countryside outside London.

The elderly and often-cranky Lady Pamela hires the vivacious and headstrong young Maeve Delaney as her companion. After an initial period of awkwardness, the two women arrive at a truce and actually begin to enjoy each other's company. Lady Pamela lost her only daughter many years ago and Maeve lost her mother to emotional detachement when she was young, so they form and interesting attachment, although never as "mother and daughter" per se.

To cope with her boredom with country living, Maeve makes Lady Pamela's prematurely retired racehorse her pet project. She is determined that he race again and this goal inspires Lady Pamela as well.

This was a lovely, feel-good book that immediately engaged me. Not great literature, but worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: interesting relationship drama
Review: Twenty-six years old Maeve Delaney needs a job fast as she is running out of money and does not want to ask her wealthy dad for cash. She reads a newspaper ad looking for a caretaker companion to a disabled elderly woman and decides the job is perfect for her. She makes up a phony résumé and obtains the position though she seems too young to do the job. The employer Henry Benham wants to simply placate his bossy wife by hiring someone to care for his octogenarian mother.

Maeve and Lady Pamela get on quite well together as the youngster ignores the older woman's rants and provides a breath of freshness to the geriatric invalid. Soon she encourages Pamela's lover Sam Elwes to spend more time with his beloved and persuades her charge to begin racing her horse Irish Dancer. As the two generations get acquainted a loving bond similar to a grandmother and granddaughter form that gives Pamela a reason to live, but what will happen once Maeve moves on?

This is an interesting relationship drama that serves as a comparison between the "old" and the "new". Maeve is an intriguing protagonist who combines the impishness of Holly Golightly with the right degree of responsibility for the safety of her companion. She gives Pamela a reason to live unlike the elderly woman's wimpy son or her authoritative daughter-in-law, who have done everything in public tastefully just short of announcing the wake. Fans who relish a modern day tale of manners will want to read this English character study.

Harriet Klausner