It takes a lot skill and imagination to make a chubby, lazy, promiscuous weed-smoking, gay man in his sixties lovable, but this British author succeeds doing that in this debut novel. But the main character of the story, set somewhere in a fictional decrepit small town in New England, is a restless, single, uneducated, stubborn woman whose relatives are reshaping the town with massive suburban housing developments. She resists their attempts to buy her out of the derelict house she has inherited from her deceased parents standing in the way of their plans and tries to wreck the house to achieve a better bargain from them -with a deadline to complete it between September, 1977 and March, 1978. There seems to be a nebulous subplot of escape from a troubled past into anonymity for several of the characters.
The only (rather weak) attempt to develop any suspense is in relation to to question as to whether or not she will succeed in completely tearing down the house and moving all the junk to the other side of a pond, in the face of multiple unforeseen obstructions, some from her relatives, and some from nature. I will never tell.
The prose is chronologically straightforward, sprinkled with bits of wry humour and lively, eccentric characters whom readers will have no difficulty in keeping straight. But I have no sense of what genre label would best fit this story. Certainly not suspense thriller, fantasy, romance, young adult, crime, humour, horror, or mystery.
There are a few good quotes about sleepy small town life that I can relate to, having grown up outside just such a town. “Some families had already placed wreaths on their doors. It was only November. They probably had to leap from holiday to holiday to holiday because waiting to die in a town like this was so incredibly dull.”
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Thanks,
Goodreads.
The Passionate Reader 