Purveyor of Enchantment
Reissued
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'A life lived in fear is a life half lived,' Clementine Hope's sister, Ophelia, is fond of quoting to her.
Clementine, thirty-something and newly divorced, lives in a small Hampshire town, teaching music and working on a collection of fairy tales left to her by her Great Aunt Elvira. But mostly she worries. She worries about the rising crime rate. She worries about disease and illness, about offending God and, in the rare moments when she is at peace with Him, about upsetting the man in the carpet shop or Mrs Challis who runs the café where she meets with her friend Jessica.
Clementine enjoys as little of the life around her as any Sleeping Beauty, Just as she thinks she has found love with Nathaniel Scott, the son of her next-door neighbour, her fears cause her to lose him.
Then, at a moment of a real crisis, Clementine sees the destructive quality of her life and resolves to change and make amends. To do so she must turn from victim to heroine, slay her personal dragon of fears and phobias, and rescue her own Prince Charming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Juxtaposing prim lyricism with comically blunt faux pas, British author Cobbold's third novel (after Guppies for Tea and A Rival Creation) is a charmingly dark contemporary romance set in Aldingham, England, where every "happily ever after" is prefaced by a "perhaps." A recent divorcee in her mid-30s, Clementine Hope is a chronic worrier and Goody Two-shoes. When she and her bratty younger sister, Ophelia, inherit a house from their spinster aunt, they also inherit a collection of unfinished fairy tales on which the aunt had been working. Clementine falls in love with Nathaniel, the attractive but alcoholic, romantically fickle son of a neighbor. But her compulsive fretfulness (which includes suspecting the town's new plumber of a series of robberies) adds up to disaster, and Clementine must become her own knight in shining armor if she is to win back the heart of her Prince Charming. Cobbold's modern fairy tale is basically sweet, though spiced with some welcome and salty carnality.