Saturday Review #4
Aug. 28th, 2010 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaAUNT DIMITY'S DEATH, by Nancy Atherton.
Cover copy: When Lori Shepherd was a little girl, her mother used to tuck her into bed at night with Reginald, her stuffed rabbit, and tell her stories about the irrepressible Aunt Dimity, an intrepid woman whose outrageous adventures in faraway England never ceased to amaze her. But Lori isn't a little girl anymore... In fact, adulthood has been particularly harsh of late. In what seemed like no time at all, Lori's mother passed away, her marriage crumbled, and she lost her job, leaving her to search not only for employment but for a decent apartment and rent money as well. Lori decided long ago that Aunt Dimity was just a character in a comforting bedtime story.
But one day down-on-her-luck Lori is summoned from the latest of her dreadful temp assignments to the mansion law offices of Willis & Willis. There, the Dickensian pair of father-and-son attorneys inform her that Aunt Dimity was indeed a real woman, and a very rich one. She has also just died and left her estate to Lori - with one catch: Lori must visit Dimity's cozy cottage in the English countryside and find a secret hidden in the trove of letters that Dimity and Lori's mother exchanged over the four decades of their friendship.
What begins as a fairy tale in an improbably cozy setting becomes a mystery - and a ghost story - as Aunt Dimity's indomitable spirit leads Lori on an other-worldly quest that Dimity could not fulfill in her lifetime. And for Lori, Dimity's bequest is even greater than she dreamed, as she discovers that in this life, true love can conquer all.
This book is the first in a (rather long) series. I reviewed one of the later ones during Blogathon, and one of my readers commented that really, the first was the best: the rest are a different story (almost literally). So on my last trip to the library, I picked up this one.
On its own, this isn't much to write home about. It's a fairly standard sort of mystery written for a female audience: the key to the mystery is an old love affair, and the point to the story isn't so much figuring out whodunnit as it is Lori's slow recovery from losing mother, husband and job in such rapid succession. Technically, there isn't even a murder.
But I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Lori starts off on the sort of ragged edge that most of us have encountered, either personally or seeing it in a friend: one too many personal disasters, living paycheck to paycheck, friends all drifted away or live too far to see regularly...she's lost her belief that people are good at heart, and she's rapidly running out of her ability to cope. When Willis & Willis appear, in best approved fairy-tale fashion, she can't quite believe that it's real. It takes time and love for her to recover. (And I do mean 'love'. Not only does the younger Willis fall for her in nothing flat, pretty much everyone they meet on the quest for Dimity's secret likes Lori. This is a good part of the reason why I say I enjoyed it, but not exactly that it's a good book -- it's too much of an id wallow.)
The fascinating part is comparing this book to the aforementioned later books in the series (see above). In the later books, Lori is a dreamer -- in fact almost too much of one, weaving elaborate stories to explain the things she notices. In this one, she's beaten and brittle, and refuses to believe in fairy tales when one hands itself to her on a silver platter. Even more telling: in the later books, the device of Aunt Dimity's journal - a book to which Lori can speak, and Dimity's words appear, like splitting the difference between telephone and an IM conversation - is just that, a device, which frankly doesn't seem to have much purpose other than sheer cutesy factor. In this book, there is an actual purpose to it: Dimity's journal isn't just a twee sounding board, it's the final proof that Dimity is still present in her cottage in ghost form. Which in turn is because she has the aforementioned secret hanging over her head, and feels that because of it, she can't properly leave this world. The drawback, of course, is that at the end of the book, the secret is discovered, everything is sorted, and of course Dimity can properly leave this world.
Except that she clearly doesn't, on account of the series continues and is several books long by this point, which rather indicates that my commenter was correct. This first book is self-contained. The others are riding its coat-tails. I am vaguely tempted to dig up the second book, assuming my library has it, and see if there's any kind of explanation, or if it merely goes on with YES SO I HAS THIS BOOK and makes the twee cover for itself.
In sum: better than its sequels, and if you're up for a good wallow, you could do worse. But not exactly a classic.
Cover copy: When Lori Shepherd was a little girl, her mother used to tuck her into bed at night with Reginald, her stuffed rabbit, and tell her stories about the irrepressible Aunt Dimity, an intrepid woman whose outrageous adventures in faraway England never ceased to amaze her. But Lori isn't a little girl anymore... In fact, adulthood has been particularly harsh of late. In what seemed like no time at all, Lori's mother passed away, her marriage crumbled, and she lost her job, leaving her to search not only for employment but for a decent apartment and rent money as well. Lori decided long ago that Aunt Dimity was just a character in a comforting bedtime story.
But one day down-on-her-luck Lori is summoned from the latest of her dreadful temp assignments to the mansion law offices of Willis & Willis. There, the Dickensian pair of father-and-son attorneys inform her that Aunt Dimity was indeed a real woman, and a very rich one. She has also just died and left her estate to Lori - with one catch: Lori must visit Dimity's cozy cottage in the English countryside and find a secret hidden in the trove of letters that Dimity and Lori's mother exchanged over the four decades of their friendship.
What begins as a fairy tale in an improbably cozy setting becomes a mystery - and a ghost story - as Aunt Dimity's indomitable spirit leads Lori on an other-worldly quest that Dimity could not fulfill in her lifetime. And for Lori, Dimity's bequest is even greater than she dreamed, as she discovers that in this life, true love can conquer all.
This book is the first in a (rather long) series. I reviewed one of the later ones during Blogathon, and one of my readers commented that really, the first was the best: the rest are a different story (almost literally). So on my last trip to the library, I picked up this one.
On its own, this isn't much to write home about. It's a fairly standard sort of mystery written for a female audience: the key to the mystery is an old love affair, and the point to the story isn't so much figuring out whodunnit as it is Lori's slow recovery from losing mother, husband and job in such rapid succession. Technically, there isn't even a murder.
But I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Lori starts off on the sort of ragged edge that most of us have encountered, either personally or seeing it in a friend: one too many personal disasters, living paycheck to paycheck, friends all drifted away or live too far to see regularly...she's lost her belief that people are good at heart, and she's rapidly running out of her ability to cope. When Willis & Willis appear, in best approved fairy-tale fashion, she can't quite believe that it's real. It takes time and love for her to recover. (And I do mean 'love'. Not only does the younger Willis fall for her in nothing flat, pretty much everyone they meet on the quest for Dimity's secret likes Lori. This is a good part of the reason why I say I enjoyed it, but not exactly that it's a good book -- it's too much of an id wallow.)
The fascinating part is comparing this book to the aforementioned later books in the series (see above). In the later books, Lori is a dreamer -- in fact almost too much of one, weaving elaborate stories to explain the things she notices. In this one, she's beaten and brittle, and refuses to believe in fairy tales when one hands itself to her on a silver platter. Even more telling: in the later books, the device of Aunt Dimity's journal - a book to which Lori can speak, and Dimity's words appear, like splitting the difference between telephone and an IM conversation - is just that, a device, which frankly doesn't seem to have much purpose other than sheer cutesy factor. In this book, there is an actual purpose to it: Dimity's journal isn't just a twee sounding board, it's the final proof that Dimity is still present in her cottage in ghost form. Which in turn is because she has the aforementioned secret hanging over her head, and feels that because of it, she can't properly leave this world. The drawback, of course, is that at the end of the book, the secret is discovered, everything is sorted, and of course Dimity can properly leave this world.
Except that she clearly doesn't, on account of the series continues and is several books long by this point, which rather indicates that my commenter was correct. This first book is self-contained. The others are riding its coat-tails. I am vaguely tempted to dig up the second book, assuming my library has it, and see if there's any kind of explanation, or if it merely goes on with YES SO I HAS THIS BOOK and makes the twee cover for itself.
In sum: better than its sequels, and if you're up for a good wallow, you could do worse. But not exactly a classic.