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Sunday, August 28, 2022

"Anna and Her Daughters" by D.E. Stevenson (re-read)

My D.E. Stevenson fan group has finished our group reading and discussion of "Anna and Her Daughters," which I first read earlier this summer (and reviewed here).  

The premise: 40-year-old Anna Harcourt has recently been widowed and finds herself with three teenaged/young adult daughters -- and very little money.  There's Helen, beautiful and spoiled;  classic middle child Rosalie; and brainy youngest sibling Jane.  While the book is titled "Anna and Her Daughters," and there are plotlines for all four women as they adjust to their new lives, the story's central character and narrator is actually 17-year-old Jane. 

Determined to live life on her own terms and within her means, Anna sells the family's big house on Wintringham Square in London and downsizes to a small cottage near her hometown in Scotland, Ryddelton. Each woman adjusts to their new life in her own way and finds her own purpose and partner... but it's not all smooth sailing along the way.  

There were plot/thematic echoes here of "The Young Clementina," one of DES's earlier novels, which we read and discussed earlier this year (my reviews here and here), as well as "The Musgraves," which we read four years ago (my review here). 

My initial rating of 3 stars on Goodreads remains unchanged.  Jane is an appealing heroine who grows and matures over the course of the book -- a modern young woman in many ways -- but as I mentioned in my original review, some of the plot twists that ultimately delivered her to the requisite happy ending didn't sit entirely well with me, and there are a lot of holes in the plot, too. The book was written in 1958, and there's a segment set in colonial Kenya that can be wince-inducing for modern readers. Overall, it's a flawed but still enjoyable light read. 

Coming up next for our group: "Sarah Morris Remembers." 

This was Book #35 read to date in 2022 (and Book #4 finished in August), bringing me to 78% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 6 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

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