Not Quite a Family Saga (Paradise House - Erica James)

Member Name: Kukana

Product:	Paradise House - Erica James
Date:	02/03/06 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good characterisation, light reading, moving, tidy ending

Disadvantages: Too much detail early in book, informal style a bit irritating

This is the story of Genevieve Baxter: thirty-something, dyslexic, recovered anorexic, and still nursing a broken heart from a teenage romance. As the novel opens she is almost single-handedly running her parents' country hotel, Paradise House. Her mother recently had some kind of mid-life crisis and disappeared across the world, and so when Genevieve's previous job came to an unpleasant end, she returned home to help her father - temporarily, she hopes. She has two younger sisters but neither of them is much help.

So, a good basis for one of Erica James' village-style romance novels. The three sisters have quite distinct characters, and their father is a delightfully practical man, who thinks nothing of himself and everything of his daughters. Just to add to the cast there's an outspoken grandmother, a four-year-old girl, and a selection of local friends and acquaintances.

Inevitably the object of Genevieve's broken heart reappears, and much of the book is concerned with the question of whether they can re-establish a relationship. Underlying that is Genevieve's search for her future: there's a sense that she has drifted since recovering from her illness, but realises that she does not want to stay forever as general dogsbody in nominal charge of someone else's dream. Yet she lacks confidence. The book is mostly told from her perspective, so we get quite an insight into her thought processes, which makes her seem very real.

It's exactly the kind of book I usually enjoy thoroughly, and by the time I was half-way through I was completely absorbed. Some of the characters are movingly portrayed, and by the final climax of the book I found tears coming to my eyes more than once.

On the other hand, it was quite an effort to get to the stage of being half-way through. The first few chapters grated. They felt almost as if they were a first draft, where the author wrote down all the details about Genevieve's surroundings, friends, family, and past history. All information which is very important to a writer to know, but which isn't really of much interest to a reader. I found the number of characters quite confusing at first, too, with no real way of working out which were going to be the important ones.

I suppose the idea was to portray Genevieve's life and perceptions accurately. As she had known all these people all her life, she might well have had anecdotes about them going through her mind. As a reader, though, I found these reflections confusing and distracting, and I felt that the first few chapters could have done with some thorough editing. I particularly found it unhelpful when scenes from the past intruded into the present. An entire flashback section is fine - indeed, one occurs shortly after the start of the novel, when Genevieve tells a friend in depth about her teenage romance and how it ended. That works well. But the minor flashbacks within the main body of the text make it difficult to read, and in general (in my opinion) are not necessary.

I also found the style a little annoying at times. The book is written quite casually with a lot of contractions: 'she'd decided' and 'he'd always been a good friend'.. and so on, rather than 'she had' or 'he had'. Minor, I know, and in conversation these are entirely natural. If the story had been written in the first person, they would have come across as Genevieve's voice, and that would have worked. But it was told in the third person, and this stopped it from flowing smoothly.

Then my final problem with this novel is there are a lot of places where other characters are subjectively described. We have to take Genevieve's word for it that one of her sisters is dreamy and the other irritable, and that certain behaviours of theirs are typical. But as it's not written in the first person, it just feels like the author telling us what to think. I would prefer to have seen more of the behaviour in action and drawn my own conclusions, rather than being given descriptions before I got to know the characters in the book.

Nevertheless, despite all these criticisms, I kept going. I have enjoyed nearly all of Erica James' novels (other than 'The Holiday'), and her book 'Precious Time' is one of my all-time favourites. So I thought it only fair to give this book a chance, and I'm glad I did. Once I began to understand the significant characters, and could put aside the minor ones in my mind, I began to relate strongly to several of them. It took me about four days to read the first hundred and fifty pages... and then just one day to finish the rest of the book! It's just under 450 pages in all, so that last day was quite a mammoth effort, but by the time I was half-way through I could barely put it down.

After I had finished the book, it occurred to me that little was made of Genevieve's dyslexia; I felt as if it was researched rather experienced by the author. It was often mentioned as something that caused her embarrassment in childhood, and references were made to her inability to spell and her dislike of writing letters; yet this could have been omitted entirely without changing the course of the novel. Other illnesses and disabilities, however, were included far more believably.

So overall, four stars. A pleasant easy read without any deep issues to consider. More plot and characterisation than chick-lit, faster-paced than a village novel, and not as thought-provoking as a family saga.

The paperback edition is published by Orion, costing £5.59 from Amazon.co.uk, or £5.49 delivered from Play.com.

Summary: A pleasant modern novel of family life and romance, revolving around a hotel.