House of Trelawney by Hannah Mary Rothschild
I loved The Improbability of Love so much, that when I saw there are another book by the same author, I jumped at the chance to review it.
Trelawney castle is old, beautiful and crumbling away. The family all love living there, but there is a tradition that once the current earl comes of age, his siblings are banished from the castle with a symbolic gift. These siblings have to make their own way in the world. The current Earl fancies himself an investment banker and keeps putting first his money and then his wife’s money into bad investments. His sister, Blaze, on the other hand, is a brilliant investment banker and foretells the coming of the sub prime mortgage crash.
The banished siblings seem to have all been the brighter ones. They are certainly the more interesting ones.
What makes the book are the characters, they are all quite extreme in their own ways and you are so invested in them that you follow the twists and turns of the story just to see that they come out okay. There’s quite a lot of head hopping going on – normally, I hate this, but in this case, I was never confused as to which person’s head I was in. Besides, I was so invested in these people that I’d probably have put up with it even if it was done badly (which it wasn’t – this psychic distance done well). The house itself is character in the book.
I genuinely enjoyed this book and raced through it. Wonderfully wry and compelling.
I got a review copy of this book via Netgalley.
Rhoda Baxter 