Our “Christmas” meeting held on Thursday 1st December was well attended with 18 members (perhaps the promise of foodie nibbles and wine may have been a bit of a draw of course?).
Brenda commenced proceedings by welcoming everyone and our new member Brenda L. to the meeting and then reading out the apologies from those few unable to be with us for the evening. She then asked everyone in turn for their comments on the book and it quickly became very apparent that absolutely everyone enjoyed this book immensely. The positive comments were echoed around the room and kept coming with members “running out” of different “nice” expressions to describe their feelings that had not already been mentioned by others before them – here are just a few :-
Engaging ; easy read; flowing ; naive; happy; lovely; innocent, fairytale; magical; sang out; enjoyable; delicious……………
All agreed that the storyline although wonderfully predictable, was a delightful one with everyone saying that they wanted to keep reading on to know what was going to happen next. A quick and easy read, with even our lovely Jeanie saying how much she enjoyed it (Yes she actually read this one!!!) Members also felt that the settings were good and evocative of the deep South with it being quite easy to get used to the “Americanisms” of the text. All wished that life could be just like that as described in the book with everything that is happening and going on in the World today.
Nearly everyone had felt quite emotional when Jack died with some even shedding a tear or two (well quite a few of us actually !!) Everyone loved Oswald as their favourite character (well maybe apart from Jack of course!) with Mildred being described as feisty and with members quite loving the Community of Lost River generally. It was also thought that the storyline was believable for the period in which we thought it was set – although it was fairly difficult to put an exact date era on it, as the only specified date actually mentioned in the book, was when the original hotel burned down in 1911 !? After a discussion most were happy to imagine that the book was possibly set around the 1950/1960s.
So in summing up A storyteller book where snippets fell out of the pages of a naive and innocent predictable but totally delightful and enjoyable short story with a lovely happy ending (one perhaps that could be found in a copy of “Woman’s Weekly” maybe!) A delicious fairytale just perfect as a Christmas read and absolutely totally loved by us all.