A review by andrew61
Mariana by Monica Dickens

4.0

I suspect that how much I like a book very much depends upon where I am in a reading cycle. So after some demanding reads recently I picked this up for a physical reading group read and seeing that it was a story of a young middle class woman's life between the wars as she develops from a tomboyish child in love with her cousin to a woman in her late 20's getting married and thought that it was unlikely to be something I would enjoy. But I really fell into the story and was totally absorbed by the travails of Mary from her jumping from a ha ha at the encouragement of the cousin, to school girl friendships, from fox hunting to drama school, from a Paris fashion house to misunderstandings and romances. Plenty of characters who could have come straight out of a black and white thirties sunday afternoon film who generally would drive me to distraction but perhaps that was the joy of the book and in the end I couldn't put it down and was totally lost in the world.
Definitely a book to make you smile but whether on another day I'd feel the same , who knows?