A review by emtobiasz
Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy

4.0

I received a copy of this title from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book reads like the literary equivalent of a Wes Anderson movie-- very stylized setting and characters, humorous in some places, touching in others. It opens with a famous playwright suffering a stroke that severely restricts his physical and mental faculties. The rest of the book focuses on the effect of the stroke on the playwright's family, friends, and the Scottish teen hired to tend to him. Clanchy makes even her most hateful characters sympathetic by revealing their histories and motivations, so that even as I was cheering on someone's downfall I knew why they had become the way they were.

A few things would make me hesitate to recommend this book far and wide:

first, there is a rather flippant treatment of a character's anorexia, and second, some readers may object to the mention of teen girls' relationships with older men, which is not presented as predatory but certainly feels icky.