Rhode Island Blues
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Weldon on top form; Weldon tackling love, sex, ageing, death; Weldon at her wittiest best; Weldon unparalleled.
Sophia is a thirty-four-year-old film editor living in Soho. Her only living relation (she thinks), her grandmother Felicity, is an eighty-three-year-old widow (several times) living in smart Connecticut. Sophia is torn between her delight in her freedom and a nagging desire for the family ties that everyone else grumbles about: casual sex is all very well, but who do you spend Christmas with? Her current bed-mate seems to be in love with a glamorous Hollywood film star (not that Sophia cares, of course: she’s a New Woman); her mad mother is dead. All she has is Felicity.
But Felicity is not your average granny. Temperamental, sophisticated, chic (and alarmingly eccentric), she has seen much of life, love and sex and is totally prepared to see more. Even if it is from a twilight home (The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement)…Twilight is not at all Felicity’s idea of fun; and quite possibly she has more idea of fun than her granddaughter.
As the two women’s stories unravel, the past rears up with all its grimness and irony; but points the way to a future that may redeem them both.
Reviews
‘Meticulously planned and mightily enjoyable, Fay Weldon’s latest is a real treat.’ Daily Mail
‘As delightfully idiosyncratic as its mettlesome heroines, this novel is well up to Weldon’s high standard of fictional entertainment.’ The Times
‘Good-humoured, wise and entertaining novel…There is so much to enjoy and admire in Rhode Island Blues.’ Spectator
‘This is terrific stuff. Nobobdy writes about the lot of modern women – and men – with the wisdom or wit of Fay Weldon…Marvellous.’ Sunday Herald, Glasgow
‘A substantial treat for those long autumn evenings after a summer of superficial beach and airport novels.’ Ham & High
‘The Golden Girls on acid.’ Sunday Express
About the author
Fay Weldon is a novelist, screenwriter and cultural journalist. Her novels include ‘The Life and Loves of a She-Devil’, ‘Puffball’, ‘Big Women’ and ‘Rhode Island Blues’. She has also published her autobiography ‘Auto da Fay’. Her most recent novel was the critically acclaimed ‘She May Not Leave’. She lives in Dorset.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can true love be found at the age of 83? It comes to pass in Weldon's latest offering (Big Girls Don't Cry, etc.), a jaunty but somewhat jaded romantic caper set in a Rhode Island retirement home and in London's Soho district. Felicity Moore is an attractive, sexually active octogenarian grandmother who has decided to move into the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement, an ominous institution where the staff is motivated to keep the occupants alive via financial inducements. Felicity's granddaughter, Sophia King, is a 34-year-old British film editor who'd rather live in the imaginary world of film (where she can discard unpleasantness on the cutting-room floor) than face the reality of her mother's suicide, her own simultaneous loathing of and longing for progeny, and her apparent lack of family relations aside from Felicity. When Sophia comes to New England to help Felicity settle into the Golden Bowl, she learns that her grandmother had another daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than a half century earlier. While Sophia returns to London in search of her long-lost aunt, Felicity falls in love with a compulsive gambler and together they outsmart the evil and sadistic Nurse Dawn. Between live half-sisters, dead stepchildren and cousins lengthily removed, the reader feels in need of a diagrammed family tree. Weldon's signature caustic humor enlivens this somewhat overwritten story, which succeeds in establishing that the search for ancestry is fairly complicated and usually disappointing. Since this is Weldon's first novel set in America, canny marketing might add more stateside readers to her devoted fans (who won't miss Weldon's name emblazoned across the cover).
