The House With Blue Shutters

by Lisa Hilton

Hilton, Lisa

Genres: Historical, Historical Fiction, Fiction

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Lisa Hilton is an author and biographer. She grew up in the north of England and read English at New College, Oxford, after which she studied History of Art in Florence and Paris. After eight years in New York, Paris and Milan she has recently returned to England and now lives in London with her husband and their daughter. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Evening Standard and the Telegraph, among others.

Reviews

[Hermien · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I didn't give the book a fair go but pretty early on I thought, why should I waste my time reading this?

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book both for the interweaving stories and the atmosphere. The war years and the present were meshed together linked by a strong sense of place so that I felt I was there.

[Cheri Cobb · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is interweavening stories between two timeliness, but I found part one of the book very hard to read. The timeliness with Oriane was fine. BUT from the new timeliness was extremely boring , drawn out with loads of unnecessary characters and details that were unneeded. I couldn't keep up with random small part characters I kept forgetting who was who and the story dragged on which was overkill and didn't need to. I almost DNF . But because I am stubborn and hate not finishing a book, I kept on with it and part 2 of the book where it mainly focuses on Orianes story and what happened in the war, was amazing, and terribly sad, I could relate to her journey with her brother William as I too have a special son. So I really felt that, and enjoyed reading her story. But again slightly too many character which were confusing at times. Also I understood the ending but it was unsatisfying aswell.

[Alib · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snippets of beautiful writing and the core stories of Claudia (modern time - visiting renovated French farmhouse) and Oriane (wartime - working on the farm) were enough to see me through but it was hard work due to the multitude of bit-characters - many only introduced very quickly amongst a slew of names. Some rather unnecessary to the core story - all the kids at the gite, ex-pat families, all the women working at the laundry, Laurent’s many friends. It was impossible to get a grip on who they all were. They would suddenly come back into the story and be called by first name instead of surname - the schoolteacher, JC - who the hell was JC! Even so, it was an interesting story of the French countryside in WW2, drudgery, tenderness and some rather shocking and nasty bits.

[Breanne Bannerman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even finish this book; it was just too boring and I couldn't get into it! Which sucks, because I really liked the setting and had high hopes for it :( I got about half-way. It's rare that I don't finish a book.

[Lizelle Liebenberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love historical fiction and had high hopes for this book, but I couldn't even get halfway. The overly descriptive language makes it a hard read - felt like a literary study! Not my kind of book.

[Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Isn't it horrible when you keep a book to one side as a treat and it just isn't? There was just nothing I liked about this book, despite giving it 100 pages before giving up. The modern story is peopled by universally dislikeable characters: the historical story that begins in the early 1930s didn't hook me at all. And the style is so pretentious, using words you need a dictionary for and no flow at all. Really disappointing - and a strong contender for my stinker of the month...

[Kirthi Jayakumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book explores one world in two time frames- with a story line tracing France in 1939, and another, tracing France in 2000. The plot is intriguing, exceptionally well written and comes across as interesting at first. But the charm ends just there- unfortunately the story doesn't flow as easily as I'd have liked it to!

[Iznaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing to read, and an engaging tale to boot.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to have sunk without trace and its author to have given up and decided to write a decidedly more marketable offering. That’s a pity, and surprising. You would have thought that given the continued fascination in the UK with WWII and the fashion for expatriate experiences in France it would have been a natural, managing to combine the two, actually hook them into each other. Perhaps it doesn’t appeal to Americans, hardly surprising, when you consider they go for all that stuff about a young man growing to maturity in a small town in the Deep South, or, as the book remarks, whatever. It was amusing, that. In fact it’s a good book. If the people are a bit bitchy, they sometimes redeem themselves, and the unlikable heroine provides an unexpected salvation for the hostess who hardly tolerated her, through a piece of surprising art historical detection. It’s about protected heritage; perhaps not everyone got that, the author underplays it a bit, decidedly un D Brownish, assuming, perhaps mistakenly, it’s so obvious as to be corny. I liked the picturesque tourist details too, the counterpointing of Gascon (? not my forte) peasant life of (now) 70 years or so back and the River Cafe style re-interpretation of it in the hands of a maniac cook. I liked that.