Off Balance

Rating:
Summary: Love it Love it Love it
Review: "Off Balance" did take a few pages for me to get into it. But after that I loved it I still love it. Mary Sheepshanks did a wonerful job with this book. I had so many feelings for the wonderful characters that I really thought they were real people. I felt like it was happening in my life. The end made me so happy with relief. The epilogue stunned me! I almost fell out of my chair. I cant wait for the next. Please let there be a next.

Rating:
Summary: Love it Love it Love it
Review: "Off Balance" did take a few pages for me to get into it. But after that I loved it I still love it. Mary Sheepshanks did a wonerful job with this book. I had so many feelings for the wonderful characters that I really thought they were real people. I felt like it was happening in my life. The end made me so happy with relief. The epilogue stunned me! I almost fell out of my chair. I cant wait for the next. Please let there be a next.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and sensitive
Review: I absolutely love this book. It is beautifully, even elegantly, written (except for a few phonetic errors such as "poured" instead of "pored"). The scene is vividly and appealingly set, and the characters finely drawn. Quite simply, I want to live in the world of Isobel and Giles and those around them. I want Isobel's spirit, her equanamity, her capacity for loving, her energy, her dog, and her household help. This is very much a testament to Ms Sheepshanks' evocative writing skills. I did not want the book to end.

What truly sets this book apart, however, are the twins, Edward and Amy. It is rare to find such wonderfully handled ten-year-olds. Amy is brilliant, loyal, challenging, and musical, and clearly feels all the pressure to succeed that the gifted sibling of a disabled person is bound to experience. The portrayal of Edward is perhaps the most sensitive and understanding portrait of a handicapped child I have ever encountered. There is no attempt to sentimentalize him nor to get inside his mind, something no one would be capable of doing. But he is so beautifully depicted that he becomes real in a way rare in any writing.

I am desperate for another novel by Mary Sheepshanks. I love all four of her books, and I REALLY want to find out what happens when Lorna drops her bombshell on Giles and Isobel. I do not hope for a sequel (although I would love one): another skill mastered by Ms Sheepshanks is her ability to tell her readers what has become of the characters in her earlier books even while she is writing about different people. For example, one learns about Flavia, the heroine of Facing the Music, in Off Balance, in which she is a relatively minor character.

Please, Ms Sheepshanks, keep writing your fabulous novels!

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and sensitive
Review: I absolutely love this book. It is beautifully, even elegantly, written (except for a few phonetic errors such as "poured" instead of "pored"). The scene is vividly and appealingly set, and the characters finely drawn. Quite simply, I want to live in the world of Isobel and Giles and those around them. I want Isobel's spirit, her equanamity, her capacity for loving, her energy, her dog, and her household help. This is very much a testament to Ms Sheepshanks' evocative writing skills. I did not want the book to end.

What truly sets this book apart, however, are the twins, Edward and Amy. It is rare to find such wonderfully handled ten-year-olds. Amy is brilliant, loyal, challenging, and musical, and clearly feels all the pressure to succeed that the gifted sibling of a disabled person is bound to experience. The portrayal of Edward is perhaps the most sensitive and understanding portrait of a handicapped child I have ever encountered. There is no attempt to sentimentalize him nor to get inside his mind, something no one would be capable of doing. But he is so beautifully depicted that he becomes real in a way rare in any writing.

I am desperate for another novel by Mary Sheepshanks. I love all four of her books, and I REALLY want to find out what happens when Lorna drops her bombshell on Giles and Isobel. I do not hope for a sequel (although I would love one): another skill mastered by Ms Sheepshanks is her ability to tell her readers what has become of the characters in her earlier books even while she is writing about different people. For example, one learns about Flavia, the heroine of Facing the Music, in Off Balance, in which she is a relatively minor character.

Please, Ms Sheepshanks, keep writing your fabulous novels!

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and sensitive
Review: I did not like this book because the words are very hard to understand and the plot was not at all making sense to me. It was confusing and the names had too much thinking involved for reading a book. Also to find out the true meaning of the plot you must read the pages over and over, and at that rate I could be done with 2 other books.
This book seems to be interesting but actually understand this book you have to have patience I found out that the meaning of "Do Not Judge a book by it's cover" really meant.
I do like one part in the book though. The part that I enjoyed was when one of the aunts came home and explained how she was sorry for being late. I liked this part because it was very simple and understandable. The rest of the story was just a blur.

Rating:
Summary: Of Balance Off my reading list
Review: I did not like this book because the words are very hard to understand and the plot was not at all making sense to me. It was confusing and the names had too much thinking involved for reading a book. Also to find out the true meaning of the plot you must read the pages over and over, and at that rate I could be done with 2 other books.
This book seems to be interesting but actually understand this book you have to have patience I found out that the meaning of "Do Not Judge a book by it's cover" really meant.
I do like one part in the book though. The part that I enjoyed was when one of the aunts came home and explained how she was sorry for being late. I liked this part because it was very simple and understandable. The rest of the story was just a blur.

Rating:
Summary: Crazy, not merely Off Balance
Review: I enjoyed the characters, the descriptions of Scotland and the upper crust country life, and the dialogue. The premise disturbed me, thus the lower rating. It is apparent from the moment Lorna enters the picture that she is determined to wedge herself in between her sister, Isobel, and her sister's husband, Giles. "Why let her stay?" is my question. If someone is endangering your marriage and upsetting your children, why allow them to remain among you?

Rating:
Summary: ood drama
Review: In Scotland, anyone who lives near the Glendrochatt estate believes that Giles and Isobel Grant are the perfect couple, lovingly raising two children together. However, the idyllic relationship between Giles and Isobel becomes disrupted when her sister Lorna returns from South Africa to spend time with them. Lorna was once Giles' lover and has jealously decided she wants everything her sibling has, starting with her spouse. Lorna is willing to pay any price to obtain everything she desires even if that means destroying her sister, niece, and nephew in the process.

Giles and Isobel's preadolescent twin children, Amy and Edward, can sense the tension between their parents and the cause, their visiting relative. They especially resent the intrusion of their aunt on their once happy home. Also adding to the confusing of adult interplay is the machinations of artist Daniel Hoffman who wants Isobel as his. <

OFF BALANCE is an entertaining complex relationship drama that works because of the hexagonal interplay among the six key players. At times, the two children with their actions and reactions to the adult muddles steal the show. Although Lorna appears as a cartoonish villain, readers will feel pity and compassion for her efforts that, in turn, allows the audience an opportunity to glimpse into the lives of some wealthy Scots.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: ood drama
Review: In Scotland, anyone who lives near the Glendrochatt estate believes that Giles and Isobel Grant are the perfect couple, lovingly raising two children together. However, the idyllic relationship between Giles and Isobel becomes disrupted when her sister Lorna returns from South Africa to spend time with them. Lorna was once Giles' lover and has jealously decided she wants everything her sibling has, starting with her spouse. Lorna is willing to pay any price to obtain everything she desires even if that means destroying her sister, niece, and nephew in the process.

Giles and Isobel's preadolescent twin children, Amy and Edward, can sense the tension between their parents and the cause, their visiting relative. They especially resent the intrusion of their aunt on their once happy home. Also adding to the confusing of adult interplay is the machinations of artist Daniel Hoffman who wants Isobel as his. <

OFF BALANCE is an entertaining complex relationship drama that works because of the hexagonal interplay among the six key players. At times, the two children with their actions and reactions to the adult muddles steal the show. Although Lorna appears as a cartoonish villain, readers will feel pity and compassion for her efforts that, in turn, allows the audience an opportunity to glimpse into the lives of some wealthy Scots.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: With this novel, Mary Sheepshanks has stretched her talents to a different level. No longer is she merely a chronicler of a certain genre of British country life...although all of her books thus far have been enjoyable, insightful, funny and delightful.

"Off Balance" is all those things as well--but it also explores a subject of serious intensity: can a family whose catalyst is a handicapped, possibly autistic child survive an intrustion that upsets its very center?

Giles and Isobel Grant, a loving and devoted couple, belong to Scotland's upper-crust country community that Sheepshanks describes so well. They have two preadolescent twin children: Amy, precocious, musical (she and her father are both enrolled in a rigorous Suzuki violin class), outgoing and loveable--and Edward, an enigmatic, sickly little boy who marches to his own drummer, and whose heartbreaking handicap is described in an unblinking and yet totally sympathetic manner by the author.

Despite Edward's illness, which necesarily dictates the family's daily routine, life at the country estate is a happy one, full of the eccentric and sometimes outrageously funny characters that populate all of Sheepshanks' novels. Case in point: Lord Dunbarnock, who has not cut his hair or beard in several decades, and who, clad always in proper tartan gear, carries antibacterial handwipes in his sporran (the Lord has a dreadful fear of germs, due to an overzealous nanny in his youth). Then there are Mick and Joss, two New Zealand giants who act as handymen/babysitters/cooks for the Grants...and whose relationship with each other is, well...loving. And, Flavia the flautist, heroine of Sheepshanks' "Facing the Music," returns, much more likeable in this book, as she has settled into motherhood, marriage, and the resumption of her brilliant musical career.

Enter Lorna, Isobel's beautiful, bitchy and self-centered older sister, who has divorced her South African husband and who begs shelter with the Grants until she can get her life together. The fact that this rehabilitation includes a plan to steal away Isobel's husband, with whom Lorna had a brief affair before Isobel was in the picture, is lost on nobody except Giles.

Lorna's entrance on the scene upsets the balance in the Grant household almost immediately, starting with her cruel treatment of Edward, whom she insists on regarding as a spoiled brat; and her aggressive foray into Isobel's daily life. Isobel, whose happy-go-lucky personality has always been her strong suit, is trying to hold on to her own balance, already knocked severely askew by Edward's unending physical and emotional problems. Amy and Edward, with the clear insight that children so often have, loathe their aunt, and she is regarded with strong distrust by Mick and Joss as well.

As if this were not enough, a sexy young male artist, Daniel, arrives at the estate to paint the backdrops for the property's theater, a pet Grant project. Although Daniel's arrival has been planned and anticipated with pleasure, his visit further complicates the precarious relationship between the sisters, both of whom are aware of his charms, and adds new stress to the now shaky Grant marriage.

Will the Grants survive the onslaught? Is their marriage really built on a solid foundation that can withstand all crises? Will sweet Isobel ever be the same? Will Giles open his eyes and see what is happening before it is too late? Will the children be harmed by the sudden tension in their daily lives? Like real life, there are no simple answers, and Sheepshanks does not offer a pat ending. Instead, she has shown us a slice of real life: poignant, tense, tragic, funny, loving, and ridiculous. I highly recommend this book; it will leave you thoughtful but smiling.