Review by Booklist Review
Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her literary accomplishments, Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites, 2014) struts her stuff in a collection of delectably acerbic and canny short stories. In gin-and-tonic prose, Lively, steeped in history and fluent in English conventions, is keenly forensic when it comes to the nature of hypocrisy and stoicism, secrecy and lies. In the title story, an insightful purple swamp hen in a Pompeian villa near the soon-to-erupt Mount Vesuvius observes the cruelty and decadence of a society sustained by slavery. The crimes and follies of privilege are also slyly exposed in Abroad, in which two young British artists in rural Spain in the 1950s find that the peasants are anything but bucolic. In License to Kill, an octogenarian stuns her 18-year-old helper by offhandedly revealing her past as a spy. Lively, perfect for fans of the Margarets Atwood and Drabble, as well as Shirley Jackson, neatly tracks class divides, the fizzling of marriages, and a long-brewing rivalry. Droll fables and mordant ghost stories round out this adroitly wise and mischievous gathering.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The same measured intelligence and subtle humor that characterizes Lively's novels (like the Booker-winning Moon Tiger) is present in this story collection. The stories often bear rereading, as Lively's quiet elegance rolls by so smoothly. "The Weekend" charts a series of accumulating missteps in a country getaway involving two couples and a disturbingly unflappable eight-year-old. "Mrs. Bennet" is an homage to Austen, the title character very like the matriarch in Pride and Prejudice, with a houseful of unmarried daughters and struggling to keep her house together in Britain in 1947. "Theory of Mind" charts the romantic relationship of two highly cerebral people. Most of the stories are short and feel like beautifully rendered portraits or slices of life. The title story is narrated by the singularly erudite hen living in the garden of an ambitious Roman politician and narrowly escaping the eruption of Vesuvius. Two longer stories, "A Biography" and "The Bridge," have shaggier structures and deal idiosyncratically with the advantages and disadvantages of advanced age, the former via a series of interviews and the latter in a first-person narrative. An effortless and masterly collection. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her literary accomplishments, Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites), now in her 80s, delivers much joy in this poignant collection of 15 stories that explore relationships, memory, and history in wonderfully varied settings. In the title story, the purple swamp hen Lively saw on a tapestry at the British Museum comes to life as a wise commentator about Pompeian society, just before Vesuvius erupts. In "License To Kill," a teenage caregiver is stunned and inspired to reconsider her life goals when her 80-year-old client casually reveals her past as a spy. Davina Porter's elegant and measured delivery is a perfect match for this collection; Lively's striking, often sparse, prose demands a slow pace. Porter's ability to present Lively's wonderfully shifty points of view gracefully helps listeners stay on track, especially in the two longer stories, "A Biography" and "The Bridge." VERDICT This exceptional collection belongs in all literary collections. ["This...is proof that [Lively's] gifts have only ripened with age": LJ 6/15/17 starred review of the Viking hc.]-Beth -Farrell, -Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How well do we ever know another person? That's the leitmotif of this witty but piercing new collection by Man Booker winner Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites, 2014, etc.).The title story sets the tone: narrated by an exotic pet in Roman Pompeii, shortly to be eradicated by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius, it shows genuine communication only between the purple swamp hen and a slave girl in an aristocratic household otherwise roiled by people who can't get along and communicate (angrily) only in a crisis. The collection's keystone, "A Biography," couples interviews conducted for a book about Lavinia Talbot, a charismatic public intellectual, with the interviewees' private, unshared recollections to create a poignant portrait of a woman with a secret wound at the heart of her life's work and to simultaneously suggest that we can never fully understand her. "Lorna and Tom" also painfully demonstrates the possibility of loving someone without ever really grasping his or her essence, giving a quietly wrenching account of a marriage that ultimately founders on the shoals of Britain's terminal class-consciousnessthough not, because Lively rarely does the expected, in the way readers might anticipate. Yet there are also radiant stories like "Point of View," in which a screenwriter and her live-in boyfriend, each yearning for a child and convinced the other doesn't want one, finally stumble into mutual accord. "The Bridge" is perhaps the collection's best showcase of Lively's gift for embracing the full range of human complexity. "How can something have happened twice over? One way for him, another for me?" asks a woman about a family tragedy she and her husband literally saw differently. Yet the story's conclusion shows the characters groping to surmount their limited perspectives, prodded by love. A droll update of Pride and Prejudice and a couple of satisfyingly scary ghost stories provide some lighter entertainment, and even in her darkest tales, Lively's fundamentally serious take on our tangled emotional lives is never bleak, merely ruefully accepting. A treasure trove of fictional gems. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
