The Dutch House

If you like Ann Patchett, you'll like this one. Not a lot happens but well written. Bel Canto the best.

This is a great book, I already read it and this is for a present.

Hopefully the book has become a good present, I was told the first chapters were very interesting

According to the book jacket of The Dutch House, the novel is a “dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past.” And indeed, the two main characters – the supremely self-confident and protective older sister Maeve and her younger brother, Danny – are obsessively connected to the lavish estate purchased by their father in the Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother has left them to their own wiles and in her place, a younger wicked stepmother and her own two daughters have moved in with their father. It is only a matter of time until they are exiled. And although they follow different paths, it is only when they come together that they are complete. I had a little trouble tapping into the male voice of Danny at first (for several pages, I thought the first-person narrator was female), but gradually, I accepted his voice because I was caught up in the narrative. Ann Patchett is a natural-born storyteller and here, like in her last book, Commonwealth, she ambitiously traces a family through a couple of generations. Both books center around an action (the exile in Dutch House, an illicit kiss in Commonwealth), and both deal with “blended families” that in reality do not blend. At the time Commonwealth was published, Ann Patchett called it her “autobiographical first novel” and I suspect that some of Dutch House is mined from those same murky areas of childhood – the complications of extended families, the theft of certain memories of childhood, the borders between realities and how we remember. It’s difficult to review the way I want to without spoilers, so I’ll just say this: I also saw parallels to religious parables. In a sense, the Dutch House is Eden – that wonderful paradise of childhood of which teens and young adults are eventually cast out. There is a central character who sets herself up to be a saint with an aberrant desire to be “of help”, and Ann Patchett nails it when she says that saints are generally despised by those who really know them. And, there is a quest for redemption. Although I have quibbles – the male voice, the somewhat rushed ending (along with certain aspects of that ending), I do think this is one of Ann Patchett’s better books. It’s not quite as good as Bel Canto (which, to my mind, is her best) nor is it as unrealistic as State of Wonder (which many readers enjoyed and I did not). It’s definitely worth reading and I give it a 4.5 rating.

After reading Tom Lake, I've gone back and read many of Ann Pritchett's books. This is one of my favorites - her writing style is wonderful and her character development unfolds in such a way that the reader feels like she's right there alone the way with them.