1 review for:

The Fairbairn Fortunes: An Edwardian Country House Romance

Una-Mary Parker

2.0 AVERAGE

tessisreading2's review

2.0

Such a soap opera. It will make absolutely no sense unless you have read its predecessor (and recently, too, because now not only do we have to keep track of the innumerable Fairbairn girls but their husbands, lovers, and children as well). Our heroine Laura is somewhat embittered, scraping away to make a living for herself and her obnoxious and ungrateful daughter;

Spoiler

sister Lizzie has fallen in love with a younger man (as, we later learn, did sister Diana – can none of these women keep it in their pants?)

; and World War I is lurking on the horizon. We whiz through 1914 in four brief chapters. Chapter five takes us to 1916, and by Chapter 6 it’s 1919 and the war is over. It’s like Downton Abbey: blink and it’s a decade later. This book makes more of an effort to focus on the sisters besides Laura, but they are all having affairs or coping with their husbands having affairs (and then returning to being blissfully married; Laura, who left her abusive alcoholic husband, is miserable, and once is left with the uneasy feeling that “if only she had tried harder” the author might have let her, too, have a happy ending) and swanning around and saying things like “We’ve never had a divorce in the family!” Laura has turned into an obnoxiously Mildred Pierce-like mother, and Caroline is a total nightmare. Not really worth it.