bed and breakfast Archives - recordedbookreview.com

Jane Green, The Beach House read by Cassandra Campbell

Nan localizes Nantucket. Charmed, beautiful, slightly eccentric, she is at that age where she can get away with mostly anything: trespassing or swimming naked or wearing scarlet lipstick everywhere.

Nan lives in a huge old house where she has decided to run a bed and breakfast for summer guests. It is this house which brings together a handful of curious, complicated personalities: Michael, Nan’s son, Bea and Daniel (a soon to be divorced couple), Daphne (a divorced real estate agent) and her hormonal and horrible daughter.

Nan eases and re-invents the lives which assemble around her; she couples, amuses, and converts her guests, into friends, into family.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

Gamash celebrates his marriage at a bed and breakfast with beds so high you need a little step stool to climb into them and bumps into a family murder.

The Beach House by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

“Don’t you know I’m going to live happily ever after anyway?”

After painting, waxing, polishing, wallpapering, and flowering up her old Nantucket house, Nan tells Sara about a man she met and loved. Sarah replies: but wouldn’t it be nice if you met him again and fell in love and lived happily ever after…?

It is then that Nan replies: “Don’t you know I’m going to live happily ever after anyway?” Thus an overgrammatical, nervously detailed book about women becomes a different kind of woman’s book. For it is a woman’s book. Men do not want to read about hypercritical wives with unemotional husbands. No, men do not want to read about the thousand layers of feelings baked into 3 women with marital problems. But then neither do women.

This is not just another old-woman-who-turns-an-old-house-into-a-bed-and-breakfast-and-finds-X (money, god, sex, success) book. This is a book about Nan, a lovely, lipsticked, free and sentimental gardener who smokes and bikes and lives in a big old house alone. Nan gathers around herself an assemblage of half couples, gay, divorced, confused and lonely. Somehow they mix and change each other — if only for the duration of a summer.

10 Years of Reviews

Self-righteous, five foot eleven cunt-cop does a "If I have to choose between doing the right thing and ratting on my cop-boyfriend I'd rather be a cunt" and spoils this perfectly curious re-take of vice-cop falls in love with wretched and beautiful prostitute. Don't you hate it when the PROTAGONIST isRed Light by T. Jefferson Parker

The technique of the teacher that will not die: there is a law professor in y our head that is still teaching you contracts, except that instead he is asking you about why you are driving to Philadelphia after you have discovered a dead ex in your house killed withThe Church Builder by AL Shields

Utterly charming, surprising, and fascinating story about ... not only the NOT Pink but Raspberry Suit worn by Jackie Kennedy but about dressmaking in Paris and New York in 1960, the fabrics, the materials, the chalk, the little Irish seamstresses. the acid smelling old women who ran the sewing shop that knocked off the Chanels,The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby read by Gabrielle de Cuir

Stitched into textiles by young girls in the early 19th century, some terribly bored, are poems. These needlepointed poems are featured as epigraphs in another "cozy" mystery about a woman who returns to Maine. Life in a small town in Maine is mostly monotonous and cold. It is also cumulative.Lea Wait, Thread and Gone read by Christina Delaine

It is rare to hear the barely conscious memories of a powerful woman reconnoitring the dimensions of a frustrated girlhood. The wooden, joyless father, the servile, fearful, nervous mother, the rules, the order, the manners, the placements, the positions, the positionings of the dinner table, extended to the smallest sensationsA Certain Justice by P.D. James read by Simon Prebble

1948 is a strange time to be a Jew. For Lonzman, the hero of this tale, it is the year the Jews in Israel are driven into the sea, and get a small beachside strip of Alaska as compensation. It is the year Lonzman's father arrives in downtown Sitka whereThe Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon performed by Peter Riegert

After the funeral, there is the family and the village. There is a batty aunt, a hysterical and heirless English lord, his ancient butler, and a smattering of inadequate and weak-willed in-laws, waiting for their share. These are the leftovers of the comfortable class, who married badly and relied onAfter The Funeral by Agatha Christie read by Hugh Fraser

For those with a curiosity about the kind of woman who is employed by Christie's and the New York auction scene: the girls, the clothes, their mothers, their mothers' wardrobe, the accents, the topknots, the hyper-academic cat-calls, the jealousies, the gallerinas: The gallery girls of New York are like starving attack dogs in really nice clothes. AllThe Price of Inheritance by Karin Tanabe read by Emily Durante

A widowed ex-schoolteacher who makes beautiful beaded jewelry and travels from craft show to craft show returns home to find a dead man in her kitchen. The local detective assigned to the case is a dog: he botches up the initial investigation and Lillianne's house is totally trashed, searchedBeaded to Death by Janis Patterson read by Gayle Hendrix

Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics ofSleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach

Have you ever wondered what a 70 year old ex-CIA agent is thinking while being greeted by an over-friendly young woman at a Senior Center? "Are you lost honey?", she asked in a volume more suitable for calling me from the other end of the hallway..." "Are you trained to speak louderGranny Under Cover by Harper Lin read by Sara Morsey

Like listening to a brand new Stones album (if you're old enough to know what an album is...) If a video of you coveting your neighbor's wife captured the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 would you rally to the Flag and turn it in? Night Fall is full ofNIGHT FALL by Nelson Demille Narrated by Scott Brick

Imagine a big black woman, Myrna from Montreal, who decides to drive South, but feels peckish after an hour and a half and so stops and bumps into a one-vache town, a fairy-tale town: Three Pines had what she craved. It had croissants and cafe au lait. It had steak fritesA Fatal Grace by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

At what point can one say that a man is a cheat? When he buys a house from you, when he tells you how to avoid paying income tax, when you help him misrepresent himself, when he helps you find a woman you can marry, when he callsGood Faith by Jane Smiley read by Richard Poe

There's nothing like a kitchen-fuck, standing up against an old refrigerator, the ketchup bottle and the jar of mayo rolling around inside, the bag of peaches falling off the top.... There's nothing like two cops, fucking. But its a signature love scene, painterly, pointilistic, confessional. Mushrooming metaphors. And very veryDarkness Peering by Alice Blanchard read by Alyssa Bresnahan

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