The End of an Error
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Lee Emery is an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen. It was then that Lee fell in love for the first time. Twenty-five years later, "what if" obsessions shake up her settled life. Should she have made a different choice—Simon—instead of the man now next to her? Struck once more by the lingering power of first love, she sets off a chain of events that catapults her back to Europe and to a second chance that she may or may not want to risk.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author is a practiced hand at warmhearted women's fiction (Host Family; Mail), and her punning title suggests she has struck a more than usually giddy note here. In fact, the humor in this tale of Lee Emery, a happily married woman of a certain age who unaccountably finds herself hankering after her first love, a wry young Englishman she met in her student days, is sometimes a little forced, and it is the moments of genuine emotion that come across more strongly. Lee has written a memoir of her glamorous grandmother Marguerite, who encouraged her fleeting London affair with Simon so long ago, and when she lets steadfast but rather boring husband Ben read it (once it's been published) and impulsively sends a copy to Simon, it churns up her whole life. The denouement is quietly touching if not entirely believable, and the portrait of Marguerite, clinging to her cherished luxuries, even as she sinks into desuetude, is skillfully composed of equal parts amusement and compassion. It's only in scenes like Lee's unhappy bookstore reading or the bestsellerdom envisaged for Ben's obsessive academic history of an obscure Maine patriarch that Medwed veers dangerously close to farce and seems in less than perfect control. A woman as bright as Lee would never settle for so threadbare a publisher for her memoir or be as excited as Medwed makes her out to be on publication day. But these are minor caveats in an enjoyable read that could provoke both smiles and tears.
