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Rating: 
Summary: it makes me laugh out loud--often!
Review: the tale of dulcie mainwearing and her adventures with a number of academic types. barbara pym wrote with a sharp eye for the eccentricities of her characters. but she did not make any of her characters black and white stick figures. read it and laugh!
Rating:
Summary: it makes me laugh out loud--often!
Review: the tale of dulcie mainwearing and her adventures with a number of academic types. barbara pym wrote with a sharp eye for the eccentricities of her characters. but she did not make any of her characters black and white stick figures. read it and laugh!
Rating: 
Summary: sweet, witty little romance
Review: This is the first Barbara Pym I have read and I have to say I was a bit put off at first. It was written and set around the 1950's in London about Dulcie Mainwairing -a 30-odd year old woman and Aylwin Forbes a 47-year-old man. It is quite odd, no very odd. In many ways. There are a cast of extras in it, Laurel, Dulcie's niece; Viola, a rather cynical woman Dulcie meets who boards with her; Mrs Williton, an aunt, an uncle, two highly eccentric neighbours and a very strange bed and Breakfast owner who is Aylwin's mother. They seem to rattle around in this story which is mostly about Dulcie's gentle obsession with Aylwin. She has clearly fallen in love and does all the strange things one does when you fall in love - she looks him up in books, finds out where his brother is, visits his mother's boarding house, and this book is mostly about that obsession - but in the end all these characters floating around seem to tie up their loose ends or become important to the story. More important, and what I really began to enjoy about Pym was the way she tied up different motifs in the plot which were seen from different characters points of view. A stone squirrel in a front yard, a stuffed eagle in the boarding house. At one stage we see Aylwin unpacking, he has bought nothing intellectual to read, just Henry James - later downstairs Dulcie overhears him and wonders to her self why he is talking so Henry Jamesian. Its just a nice overlay of images from different viewpoints and it starts you realising how much in common Dulcie and Aylwin have.Like I said, I was a bit put off at first, but its a lovely, gentle, clever little romance that fairly soon I was really enjoying it.
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