Arriving home from a holiday, to find her world is not how it could be, or should be, Kate Codogan starts her journaling at 33 Cherry Blossom Road , Dorton, United Kingdom, Europe, Planet Earth.Kate fights with her ever present mother, Biddy.
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Kate's choices of friends, boyfriends, career ambitions, style of living, are always displeasing voiced by Biddy. As a matter of fact, Biddy is just displeased about everything and everyone, especially Kate.
Once married to Rodney, and after the birth of her only child, Charley, Kate takes hold of her life as wife and mother.
The review of this Book prepared by Kathryn Howard
Kate passes out and dreams of a spiral stairway leading to a door marked, well, nevermore. Nevermore will she sleep with Rodney, who has lately adopted bizarre sexual practices. Through '60s, '70s and '80s England, Kate comes of age and middle years. From early on, her mother, difficult narcissistic Biddy, and her father, loving but too wussy to stand up to Biddy, disparage Kate's interest in science and overzealously guard her virtue. Shoehorned into an education major by her parents, she becomes an elementary schoolteacher and is betrayed by her fiance Jack. Her friends Moira and Ingrid and her Welsh paternal grandparents are her only constants. On the rebound from Jack, she marries prosperous Rodney but is marginalized by his eccentric family.
Rodney devotes himself mostly to sports and doesn't object when his smarmy pal Todd hits on Kate. Kate devotes herself to son Charlie and cooking, her weight yo-yoing. Periodically, her parents lure her home, where she falls back into her childlike posture, alternately nurtured and slapped. Back to 1995. Kate wonders why she stood for it for so long, and so do we. When her mother opposes Kate's move to France and sides with Rodney in the divorce, Kate divorces her parents as well. Kabak's gift for describing wonderful food and decor, and her way of encapsulating decades in a few swift strokes, take this tale beyond the standard middle-age revenge formula.
The review of this Book prepared by Karen Kahler
