Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve's room.
Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea's advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives.
For all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother's self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.
Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.
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[The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister's room and told us to come downstairs]***
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 24 September 2019, 336 pages, ebook, ARC from @BloomsburyBooks via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I've never read the author before though her name is familiar. If The Dutch House is anything to go by, I've missed out. I have a morbid fascination with dysfunctional families, the more dysfunctional the better. I love to write about them and read about them. I love the setting, the house of the title is a place of secrets where people have died and left behind their belongings. There's something unsettling and almost sinister about the house. The characters are brilliantly written and vivid. The best is the sinister stepmother of the current family, Andrea, what a delightful monster. The pace of the book is very slow at times which didn't work for me. The book uses a non-linear timeline. I tend to enjoy this and it works really well in the book. I enjoyed the way the book is structured with the current family tragedies interwoven with tragedies of the past. The house is really the main character and I've not come across that before. It works really well. The Dutch House is also beautifully written. I'm glad I gave this a chance and have a new author to obsess over.
