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Ordinary Families
'I was running on happily because it was so good to be able to watch him under cover of my own talk, knowing exactly now what I wanted of him - mind, body, everything'
Lallie is one of four children of the eccentric, quintessentially English Rush family. Boating, bird watching and inter-family rivalry are the focus of life in their village - Pin Mill, on the Suffolk marshes. Brought up on fair play and the 'family sense of humour' the Rush children soon learn to fend for themselves - on water and on dry land. We watch as Lallie grows to adulthood; loving and hating her 'ordinary' family, carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Margaret, who claims the lion's share of everything. But Lallie is special too, clear, clear-sighted, sexually aware. Just as well, for to keep the man she loves she faces the biggest family fight of all..
Lallie is one of four children of the eccentric, quintessentially English Rush family. Boating, bird watching and inter-family rivalry are the focus of life in their village - Pin Mill, on the Suffolk marshes. Brought up on fair play and the 'family sense of humour' the Rush children soon learn to fend for themselves - on water and on dry land. We watch as Lallie grows to adulthood; loving and hating her 'ordinary' family, carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Margaret, who claims the lion's share of everything. But Lallie is special too, clear, clear-sighted, sexually aware. Just as well, for to keep the man she loves she faces the biggest family fight of all..
340 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
3 people are currently reading
186 people want to read
About the author
E. Arnot Robertson
16 books1 followerEileen Arbuthnot Robertson was an English novelist, critic and broadcaster.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 7, 2015
” ‘If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead'” - Virginia Woolf
This novel should be, as with many of the Virago Modern Classics, classed as “middlebrow” and thereby dismissed from the reading lists of all good, god-fearing Readers of Literature.
That such literature was, during the first half of the 20thc, read by the vast majority of literate women, regardless of class, and that it was within these texts that the most complex and subtle explorations and re-definitions of gender roles was carried out is, if we are to believe what we are told, irrelevant.
Such works are considered too easy, too unchallenging, too simplistic in plot and structure, too far from “Art”...
The easiest way to spot such texts is to locate those predominantly read by ladies. Men, it goes without saying, are far too discerning to be lured by the siren call of such comforting books.
This is, of course, bullshit.
Indeed, reading such texts makes abundantly clear that refashioning of the home, of family and of gender was underway well before the 2nd World War made such changes dramatically visible, that a novel can contain complex experimental depths below its glittering surface, and that an easy read is not necessarily an easy read...
If the majority of women are trapped by the existing patriarchy in a world built from children, husband and home, who are we to dismiss their desire to explore the landscape of this prison in their fiction?
Why is the interior life of a young, mildly eccentric, English girl not just as much the worthy subject of art as the ridiculous teenage romanticism of Werther?
But such thinking has been firmly entrenched for a long time, and does much to explain why many of these texts fell quickly out of print after the war and have never received the critical consideration they deserve.
"It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel - the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel - seems to exist only for women."
George Orwell, 'Bookshop Memories' in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol 1, An Age Like This, 1920-1940 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969; article first published 1936) p. 244.
What a load of bollocks Georgie.
Of course, one should not go too far here - there are a lot of very mediocre works out there, and whilst everything I have read published by VMC has been worth reading, relatively few have been five-star, knock-your-socks-off, wonders. But proportionally no more than those written by men, or those still kept in print by the big-boys...
Regardless, art should be critiqued based on the work's intent - these novels are not attempting to be the next Ulysses (which is not to say there are not interesting experimental things to be discovered within them) so should not be considered "lacking" because they use relatively traditional forms. What is new, what is daring and radical, is their subject matter and their point of view - there is a weight given to female experience and subjectivity in works like Ordinary Families which retains its vitality and power even today. The mention, for instance, of the frustration and worry attendant to an unfortunately timed period, is of immense importance - both from a sociological and a purely human perspective. It is by experiencing our own interiority in the word-shared mind of another that we feel a little less isolated and a little more empowered.
And this specific novel? Well, apart from what can be inferred from my comments above, there are some wonderful descriptions of nature and of boats and sailing - particularly because she refuses to fall into the usual trap of having her young girl fall into flowery, romanticised language - her engagement with nature is scientific, hard, unsentimental, and yet still deeply beautiful. There are too few fictional heroines allowed to be so "unfeminine" in their love of birds and bunny rabbits...
It is not perfect, by any means, but she writes very well indeed, has a great sense of humour, and understands the complexities of a young mind. She also muses fascinatingly on Time throughout, which could have been the subject of a whole other ramble from me...
June 2, 2025
Another contribution from Virago, this one was published in 1933. It is set in Suffolk in a small village (Pin Mill) on the banks of the River Orwell. The Rush family are the centre of the novel and we see things from the point of view of one of the daughters, Lalage (Lallie). The book covers a number of years and ends with Lallie in her twenties, so there is certainly a coming of age element to it.
The novel is a snapshot of 1920s village life, revolving around three families The Cotterell’s (rather left leaning with a hint of Bloomsbury), The Quest’s (richer and a little stand-offish) and the Rush’s themselves (outdoorsy and very much into sailing). There are also a few members of the lower classes dotted about as well.
The first part of the book, dealing with Lallie’s childhood, involves a lot of sailing and chasing around after wildlife. This actually gave it a bit of a Swallows and Amazons flavour, which I found a little irritating. It was all pretty jolly and given some of the risky sailing processes and procedures, I was amazed none of the kids drowned. However the novel moves on to some of the usual teenage angsts (not necessarily an improvement, trembling of stiff upper lips and so on) and on again to marriage and concerns about what to do with one’s life.
For me, one of the strengths of the novel was some of the more minute observations of nature. She was very popular in her day and her novels were described as middlebrow. Harold Nicholson summed up her “middlebrowness”:
“Miss Arnot Robertson is too interested in bird-life, too contemptuous of aesthetics, too brisk and bouncing to please the high-brow; and the low-brow finds her saying sharp and horrid things about the public school traditions of romance and what not.”
Another plus is the fact that the protagonist, Lallie, is awkward, clumsy and rather prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. She, at least, is endearing. It’s all very middle class English though. Mixed feelings.
The novel is a snapshot of 1920s village life, revolving around three families The Cotterell’s (rather left leaning with a hint of Bloomsbury), The Quest’s (richer and a little stand-offish) and the Rush’s themselves (outdoorsy and very much into sailing). There are also a few members of the lower classes dotted about as well.
The first part of the book, dealing with Lallie’s childhood, involves a lot of sailing and chasing around after wildlife. This actually gave it a bit of a Swallows and Amazons flavour, which I found a little irritating. It was all pretty jolly and given some of the risky sailing processes and procedures, I was amazed none of the kids drowned. However the novel moves on to some of the usual teenage angsts (not necessarily an improvement, trembling of stiff upper lips and so on) and on again to marriage and concerns about what to do with one’s life.
For me, one of the strengths of the novel was some of the more minute observations of nature. She was very popular in her day and her novels were described as middlebrow. Harold Nicholson summed up her “middlebrowness”:
“Miss Arnot Robertson is too interested in bird-life, too contemptuous of aesthetics, too brisk and bouncing to please the high-brow; and the low-brow finds her saying sharp and horrid things about the public school traditions of romance and what not.”
Another plus is the fact that the protagonist, Lallie, is awkward, clumsy and rather prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. She, at least, is endearing. It’s all very middle class English though. Mixed feelings.
October 25, 2016
With its ironic title, this 1933 novel explores the underlying tensions of so-called ordinary marriages and happy families. We see the glories of country life (it is, after all, an English novel), and its comic pettiness; and the crowding out of the heroine's individuality. As the heroine matures, she discovers, bit by bit, that the families around her mask false relationships, broken promises, and disappointments-- and it is her gift (or curse) to see them clearly. The future that she chooses for herself is similarly, and poignantly, murky. A wonderful novel.
May 7, 2015
I first read this - picked up from a library sale - in the early 1990s and loved it. So many books fail to hold their initial appeal and I a different person then. I remembered only that it was about sailing and mentioned Harwich.
Re-reading it I was similarly enchanted by the prose, increasingly gripped by the insights into family life and its accompanying tensions as Lally grows up and finds herself and how to deal with her family and hugely admiring of the whole.
Re-reading it I was similarly enchanted by the prose, increasingly gripped by the insights into family life and its accompanying tensions as Lally grows up and finds herself and how to deal with her family and hugely admiring of the whole.
January 3, 2009
This 1933 novel is basically a coming of age story, but there are many fascinating undercurrents. It also has some wonderful writing on sailing, the English countryside, and the natural history that goes along with that. The social context sets upper middle class outdoorsy life against a counterpoint of the avant garde culture of the time.
September 25, 2022
I really liked this novel, first published in 1933 and then republished as a Virago Modern Classic. However I didn’t always understand it, because there’s a lot of sailing jargon. At the same time, even though I couldn’t always visualize the sailboat parts that were mentioned, I got the spirit of it.
In general, the writing is deft, sometimes beautiful, often funny. It’s set on a little coastal town in Sussex, England, and it’s about the Rush family. The father is a great storyteller with an adventurous past, handsome and charismatic, while the mother is kind and very involved in the lives of all four children. The narrator is the third child, Lallie. We follow them for about ten years, until Lallie is almost twenty, and we also learn about their neighbors, the Cottrells and Quests, in the little town of Pin Hill.
The Rush family is proud of its idiosyncrasies, including its courage, knowhow and its mastery of sailing. At the same time, the love language of the Rushes is teasing, and so family members are always bandying about any scrap of vulnerable information. For Lallie, a private person with a whole inner life involving birds, this is especially hard. And Margaret, the youngest daughter, is especially good at finding out and disseminating what’s private and sacred to Lallie.
The writing is very good - often funny, sometimes breath-taking.
Some quotes:
< Robust humour was a speciality in our family, and being laughed at was considered a tonic automatically wholesome for anyone at any time, with the exception of God, who alone was not supposed to be improved by having His corners rubbed off (mother’s favourite expression) with this strong mental abrasive: the Old Testament contained too many records of His inability to take a joke in good part; but save on sacred subjects one was always safe in being funny with a Rush; it was part of the home-made tradition. >
< At Littlehampton, as usual in seaside places, there was nothing to do. Perspiring women, tightly encased in black, towed shrilly protesting children along the shadeless promenade, showering them with threats in whose execution the experienced children obviously disbelieved. Over the sands as well, and for several yards out into the sea, brooded that atmosphere of vague maternal menace which is peculiar to English coastal resorts. >
< I tried to stir our huge, indolent cat from its day-dreaming, by making it self-conscious about its position on the silly little stool which Ronald had made for it when it was a kitten. Though it had long outgrown this particular resting place, habit held it there and for the greater part of every day it lay with its fore part on the stool and its after-end overhanging absurdly on to the floor. When I pushed its hind legs on to the stool, the forelegs came off, but even in this new uncomfortable attitude it maintained its soft, savage aloofness until, in the effortless way of a cat, it had made me look the sillier of the two. >
< A female heron, blind in one eye from a recent fight, had won possession of a particularly fine fishing point about a mile up the river, where the woods swept down to the water and threw a deep shadow over it in the afternoons. Only the excellence of her haunt, which made her invisible to the fish for half the day, had saved her from slow starvation after her sight began to fail. Desperately and pathetically she practiced at intervals all day, when fishing was slack, the quickness of her one remaining eye, throwing up and catching a twig in her beak time after time with a persistence that fascinated me, knowing as I did – and as she did too, apparently – that it was only a matter of time before some other hungry fisher discovered that she was maimed by that last fight for possession and might now be driven off successfully, to take her chance where there was no kindly shadow to help her, and only the keen of sight could survive. >
< I promised angrily and went on into the sun-dappled woods, accepting none of their shining green consolation at first because of my preoccupation with the longed-for day when I should be able to walk out of any house at any moment, giving no reason to anyone. >
< On land, a fierce wind sweeps by in separate gusts, with softer intervals between, flowing constantly from one direction. But over water the pulse in the angry air quickens to a relentless fluttering. The invisible hands that batter at one’s face and body have an infinite variety of weight and cunning with which to bruise the senses, and the point of attack alters subtly, with each flutter, so that the dazed mind longs for continuity almost as much as for respite, if only for a few seconds’ duration; and finds neither. >
< I did not know what I wanted to do with Time, but it was certainly not playing at music and sketching and the acquisition of foreign languages, for none of which I had any aptitude, nor talking to girls at the romantic age, who bored me unless I did most of the talking, when I bored them. >
< There was about us still that curious sense of unreality which comes on summer evenings when the air begins to pulse with the gathering darkness, and distances grow uncertain. >
< Unable to sleep, I sat listening to the voices in the rigging, which cannot often by heard by day. They come only in calms, from the direction of the mast – sounds like the soft murmur of several human voices talking, a few short sentences at a time, not whispering, but as if they spoke in a natural tone a very long way away. Holding my breath, I have almost caught words when sailing single-handed, several miles from shore and out of sight of any other boat. I do not know if these sound-mirages can be explained by the faint creaking of the leather on the gaff-jaws, inaudible at other times, or are the magnification, through the hollow sounding-box of the hull, of the noise of currents moving against the keel, but air-borne or water-borne, they creep through the boat bringing with them a sense of companionship. When I was particularly lonely they were comforting to me. >
In general, the writing is deft, sometimes beautiful, often funny. It’s set on a little coastal town in Sussex, England, and it’s about the Rush family. The father is a great storyteller with an adventurous past, handsome and charismatic, while the mother is kind and very involved in the lives of all four children. The narrator is the third child, Lallie. We follow them for about ten years, until Lallie is almost twenty, and we also learn about their neighbors, the Cottrells and Quests, in the little town of Pin Hill.
The Rush family is proud of its idiosyncrasies, including its courage, knowhow and its mastery of sailing. At the same time, the love language of the Rushes is teasing, and so family members are always bandying about any scrap of vulnerable information. For Lallie, a private person with a whole inner life involving birds, this is especially hard. And Margaret, the youngest daughter, is especially good at finding out and disseminating what’s private and sacred to Lallie.
The writing is very good - often funny, sometimes breath-taking.
Some quotes:
< Robust humour was a speciality in our family, and being laughed at was considered a tonic automatically wholesome for anyone at any time, with the exception of God, who alone was not supposed to be improved by having His corners rubbed off (mother’s favourite expression) with this strong mental abrasive: the Old Testament contained too many records of His inability to take a joke in good part; but save on sacred subjects one was always safe in being funny with a Rush; it was part of the home-made tradition. >
< At Littlehampton, as usual in seaside places, there was nothing to do. Perspiring women, tightly encased in black, towed shrilly protesting children along the shadeless promenade, showering them with threats in whose execution the experienced children obviously disbelieved. Over the sands as well, and for several yards out into the sea, brooded that atmosphere of vague maternal menace which is peculiar to English coastal resorts. >
< I tried to stir our huge, indolent cat from its day-dreaming, by making it self-conscious about its position on the silly little stool which Ronald had made for it when it was a kitten. Though it had long outgrown this particular resting place, habit held it there and for the greater part of every day it lay with its fore part on the stool and its after-end overhanging absurdly on to the floor. When I pushed its hind legs on to the stool, the forelegs came off, but even in this new uncomfortable attitude it maintained its soft, savage aloofness until, in the effortless way of a cat, it had made me look the sillier of the two. >
< A female heron, blind in one eye from a recent fight, had won possession of a particularly fine fishing point about a mile up the river, where the woods swept down to the water and threw a deep shadow over it in the afternoons. Only the excellence of her haunt, which made her invisible to the fish for half the day, had saved her from slow starvation after her sight began to fail. Desperately and pathetically she practiced at intervals all day, when fishing was slack, the quickness of her one remaining eye, throwing up and catching a twig in her beak time after time with a persistence that fascinated me, knowing as I did – and as she did too, apparently – that it was only a matter of time before some other hungry fisher discovered that she was maimed by that last fight for possession and might now be driven off successfully, to take her chance where there was no kindly shadow to help her, and only the keen of sight could survive. >
< I promised angrily and went on into the sun-dappled woods, accepting none of their shining green consolation at first because of my preoccupation with the longed-for day when I should be able to walk out of any house at any moment, giving no reason to anyone. >
< On land, a fierce wind sweeps by in separate gusts, with softer intervals between, flowing constantly from one direction. But over water the pulse in the angry air quickens to a relentless fluttering. The invisible hands that batter at one’s face and body have an infinite variety of weight and cunning with which to bruise the senses, and the point of attack alters subtly, with each flutter, so that the dazed mind longs for continuity almost as much as for respite, if only for a few seconds’ duration; and finds neither. >
< I did not know what I wanted to do with Time, but it was certainly not playing at music and sketching and the acquisition of foreign languages, for none of which I had any aptitude, nor talking to girls at the romantic age, who bored me unless I did most of the talking, when I bored them. >
< There was about us still that curious sense of unreality which comes on summer evenings when the air begins to pulse with the gathering darkness, and distances grow uncertain. >
< Unable to sleep, I sat listening to the voices in the rigging, which cannot often by heard by day. They come only in calms, from the direction of the mast – sounds like the soft murmur of several human voices talking, a few short sentences at a time, not whispering, but as if they spoke in a natural tone a very long way away. Holding my breath, I have almost caught words when sailing single-handed, several miles from shore and out of sight of any other boat. I do not know if these sound-mirages can be explained by the faint creaking of the leather on the gaff-jaws, inaudible at other times, or are the magnification, through the hollow sounding-box of the hull, of the noise of currents moving against the keel, but air-borne or water-borne, they creep through the boat bringing with them a sense of companionship. When I was particularly lonely they were comforting to me. >
May 23, 2023
I was not too keen on this novel and gave it 2.5 stars. I generally sing the praises of Virago Modern Classics, and this was a re-issue by them (novel was originally published in 1933, and re-issued in 1982), and this is the second book in a row of Virago Modern Classics I was not too fond of. Maybe I need to take a break and order some TBR books from my local library (i.e., need to read more recent books methinks).
Big problem with this book was her voluminous details on yachting. Boy, if you like to commandeer small ships this is the book for you. If you are not into that, there are a whole bunch of pages that will bore you to tears. I was ready to give up a couple of times but I had put in 50 pages and then 100 pages.... Sigh, a 318 pager. I guess what kept me going was the fact that I had already invested time into reading the book plus there were some very good sections...I hear tell that ‘Four Frightened People’ is a good book of hers, so I guess I will give that a shot.
Syllabus
• “Ordinary families are all alike, every ordinary family is extraordinary in its own way,” writes Polly Devlin in her introduction to this delightful novel, first published in 1933.
• Lallie is one of four children of the eccentric, quintessentially English Rush family. Boating, bird watching, and interfamily rivalry are the focus of life in their village on the Suffolk Marshes. Brought up on fair play and the occasionally cruel and destructive ‘family sense of humor,’ the Rush children soon learn to fend for themselves—on water and on dry land. We watch as Lallie grows to adulthood: loving and hating her ‘ordinary’ family, carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful, calculating, sexually precocious sister Margaret, who claims the lion’s share of everything. But Lallie is special too: clever, clear-sighted, strong-willed and passionate — a girl who sees ‘the falseness in family relations, the cracks in the glaze of unity. When she falls in love with Gordon Summers, a man with a troubled past and an endless curiosity about human nature that matches her own, she faces the biggest family fight of all.
Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2021/...
• http://agirlwalksintoabookstore.blogs...
• https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2...
Note: after her husband died, she couldn’t live without him. She committed suicide within a year of his death.
Big problem with this book was her voluminous details on yachting. Boy, if you like to commandeer small ships this is the book for you. If you are not into that, there are a whole bunch of pages that will bore you to tears. I was ready to give up a couple of times but I had put in 50 pages and then 100 pages.... Sigh, a 318 pager. I guess what kept me going was the fact that I had already invested time into reading the book plus there were some very good sections...I hear tell that ‘Four Frightened People’ is a good book of hers, so I guess I will give that a shot.
Syllabus
• “Ordinary families are all alike, every ordinary family is extraordinary in its own way,” writes Polly Devlin in her introduction to this delightful novel, first published in 1933.
• Lallie is one of four children of the eccentric, quintessentially English Rush family. Boating, bird watching, and interfamily rivalry are the focus of life in their village on the Suffolk Marshes. Brought up on fair play and the occasionally cruel and destructive ‘family sense of humor,’ the Rush children soon learn to fend for themselves—on water and on dry land. We watch as Lallie grows to adulthood: loving and hating her ‘ordinary’ family, carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful, calculating, sexually precocious sister Margaret, who claims the lion’s share of everything. But Lallie is special too: clever, clear-sighted, strong-willed and passionate — a girl who sees ‘the falseness in family relations, the cracks in the glaze of unity. When she falls in love with Gordon Summers, a man with a troubled past and an endless curiosity about human nature that matches her own, she faces the biggest family fight of all.
Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2021/...
• http://agirlwalksintoabookstore.blogs...
• https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2...
Note: after her husband died, she couldn’t live without him. She committed suicide within a year of his death.
August 26, 2019
The novel covers the adolescence (the years between 12 and 22) of Lallie, the heroine and narrator--the third child of four of a Roman Catholic, sailing family in Suffolk, and the 'brainiest'--in a context where 'brainy' is not a compliment. Lalage thrills to birds, to the life of the estuary and marshes, in a way indulged but embarrassing to her devoted family. Her father, impossibly handsome and dashing, was an adventurer, who crawled over the Andes in Chile in the incongruous garb of a dead man's Charterhouse soccer shirt (he himself went to Wanstead Boys' Grammar). He wintered starving inland in Greenland. Studiedly offkey in polite company, he prizes physical courage, grace and integrity. This man, Rush, carelessly estranged his eldest son, his very spit, by suggesting the boy wants to pull out of a regatta race in a barely seaworthy yacht because of fear. In a series of comic-dramatic episodes, despite Mr Rush's punitive handicapping, his four children contrive to win four of the prime races on a day of high sea and stomach-churning wind.
Over the course of the story Lalage comes into herself sexually and in independence of mind. The family break with their intellectual neighbours, the Cottrells, who do not invite them to their glitzy Bohemian party. The oldest son, Ronald, and daughter, Dru, a prematurely old-maidish type with a horror of sex, pose as comic grotesques outside the gates, as fortune-tellers, prostitutes, indigent illegitimate sons. The whole family is striking; but Lallie's youngest sister, Margaret, her finishing-school roommate, is outstandingly beautiful and robustly callous. She has thowaway sex (to her) as a teen, as the heroine does not. Suffocated by family love, Lallie discovers her atheism and renounces all but the incidental beauties of yachting. By the end she has won a qualified triumph in love and escaped (again to some degree) the orbit of her extraordinary 'ordinary' family.
Over the course of the story Lalage comes into herself sexually and in independence of mind. The family break with their intellectual neighbours, the Cottrells, who do not invite them to their glitzy Bohemian party. The oldest son, Ronald, and daughter, Dru, a prematurely old-maidish type with a horror of sex, pose as comic grotesques outside the gates, as fortune-tellers, prostitutes, indigent illegitimate sons. The whole family is striking; but Lallie's youngest sister, Margaret, her finishing-school roommate, is outstandingly beautiful and robustly callous. She has thowaway sex (to her) as a teen, as the heroine does not. Suffocated by family love, Lallie discovers her atheism and renounces all but the incidental beauties of yachting. By the end she has won a qualified triumph in love and escaped (again to some degree) the orbit of her extraordinary 'ordinary' family.
December 21, 2023
A hidden gem found in a second hand bookshop in the Peak District. Reading this story of 'ordinary families' through the thrillingly accurate observations of Lallie (full name: Lalage) growing up in 1920s/30s in East Anglia has been absolutely joyous. Her relationship with her unreachable and beautiful younger sister is particularly fascinating and uncomfortable at the same time. I loved it and the copy being one printed in 1947, with the classic penguin orange and white striped format and much read browned pages, completed the magic.
July 20, 2019
I started this book thinking it was Arthur Ransome for grown ups and then stumbled into a coming of age novel in England in the 1930s. I wonder if that was the author’s attention. If it was then I think on the whole it worked.
December 18, 2023
Some humour in the main character's idealisation of her horrible family but I wish the author had had more ambition for her future.
March 12, 2008
Not an overwhelming story, but some of the descriptive passages are just amazing.
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