All Done With Mirrors

by Gabrielle Donnelly

British expatriate Pauline Mills, who works for a Los Angeles magazine, enjoys a laid-back existence with her California friends and co-workers

Hardcover

First published December 3, 2012

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pauline made the journey across the pond from grey, rainy London to sunny Los Angeles sixteen years ago and never looked back. She built herself a good life: she has a successful job as an editor for a magazine, she's attractive and healthy, she's friends with movie starlets and writers, and in a relationship with a man she's beginning to realise is more serious than she thought. Enter Mary - about Pauline's age, also from England with family ties to aristocracy, but somewhat mousy and shy and lonely after her husband's recent death. Pauline doesn't like Mary, but feels compelled to help her out of pity and guilt over her less than favourable feelings towards her, facing uncomfortable truths about herself along the way.

It's a very anticlimactic tale. The twist that Pauline's boyfriend has fallen in love with Mary is something I saw coming from early on and, as such, the chapter from his point-of-view (in a book otherwise exclusively written in 3rd person limited from Pauline's POV) was utterly unnecessary and jarring the narrative. Other than that, the plot floats on without distinguishable heights and lows, a gradual journey of self-discovery where Pauline learns that she's not as English as she thought she was, not as nice, not as rational, not as polite, not as unflappable - nothing like the person she thought she was at all.

Even though I was sympathetic to Pauline's frame of mind - my reaction towards Mary was similar to hers - I never fully warmed up to her. In fact, truly likeable characters are scarce in this book; in fact it wasn't until Jennifer (fresh from the UK, refreshingly honest, not obsessed with weight and health and being popular, and obviously both fascinated and alienated by the mindset of the people in L.A.) turned up near the end that I found myself actually honestly enjoying a character. Which was possibly exactly what the author had in mind, but it made it a little hard to get through the first 4/5 of the book.

What I truly liked was that it wasn't a book about love. Pauline's road to self-discovery didn't involve finding the perfect romance and settling down, it didn't end with her walking into the stunning L.A. sunset hand in hand with a tall, dark and handsome stranger. In fact, at the end, she was alone and spiteful and angry, and yet more herself and more honest than she seemed throughout the better part of the novel, and even though it wasn't a happy ending in the traditional sense, it didn't feel like an unhappy one either.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

These earlier novels by Donnelly have a nice line in not-very-nice protags - I think their lineage may be Lucy Snowe in Villette, in this one and Faulty Ground it's all about the woman in the alien strange place, though admittedly, LA not very like Brussels.