Amy's Reviews > The Summer House

Ugh...I finished it. I could not stay with the beginning and my mind kept on wandering. I couldn't keep the people straight and thought that it might be a tool the author was using for a big reveal. No...it was just a false attempt at such I think. I have no idea how I got into it enough to finish it. It had some charming parts but really it was, well, meh.

Furthermore, the author kept on interjecting strange words for verbs...or just using them out of place. I'm sure some would say that is because it is an English or Welsh author but I have read plenty of English or Welsh authors and they don't do this. For example, "The dog was quartering the kitchen table." What does that mean? I guess it was walking around under it in a pattern that divided the table into quarters? I wish I had written them all down as I read them because the words made absolutley no sense...like saying, "We were all marmalade with wonder". (Dear Ms. Willett, feel free to borrow that phrase for your next project.)


Ugh..I could go on and on. The overly flowery discriptions of flowers thrown in for no reason. The predictable reveal that seemed a tool to just end the book. The best was at the end when I read the last page "About the Author". It is 6 lines and tells about how she had dreams of becoming a ballerina but that ended when she grew out of the classical proportions required. Seriously? How old are you and THIS is what you want people to define you by? Whilst rubbish.

Perhaps I am being too spaniel?

(One more thing...if Tom is 40 and his father was in the Afghan war and died when he could scarcely remember him that would have been about 30 years ago. Was there an Afghan war in 1992?)