The House at the End of Hope Street

I picked up The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag because I wanted something light. The book is about a magical house that becomes a haven for women in trouble. The house provided a place of solace for notable people from Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf, and their talking portraits now line the hallway (much like the past headmasters of Hogwarts in Dumbledore's office).

This book is definitely light, but it has its moments of sadness. The main protagonist is Alba Ashby, the youngest PhD student at Cambridge University. After her professor steals her ideas for a paper, Alba confronts the advisor and is dropped from her program. She comes from a rich family with a lot of dark history, of affairs and murder accusations. There are other residents at the house--Greer, a down-and-out actor, and Carmen, a singer who is escaping the haunting of an abusive relationship. Peggy is an older woman who is the house's caretaker/landlord with psychic abilities.

I liked the magical elements of this novel and all of the literary references to Plath/Woolf/Dorothy Parker/etc. There are several instances in the novel when characters are brought together by sharing preferences in books, proving that a good novel can unite lovers and estranged family members. This use of books to move along relationships and plot points was lovely.

I was very interested in what was going on in Alba's life, but was less interested in most of the plot lines of the other ladies in the house. Their stories were not as deeply developed as Alba's, and I had a harder time connecting to them. There were also some very one-dimensional characters, like two of Alba's siblings who are so mean and self-centered that they seem like sad cliches of "evil" older siblings (think wicked stepsisters type of thing).

My other complaint was that I found a lot of the lines of prose to be a bit cliched. Point and case: "The twenty-year-old crack in his heart has never really healed" (101). The references the book makes are so focused on the literary that I wish some of the prose/dialogue was stated a bit differently.

I do have to give a thumbs up to van Praag because she portrayed a lesbian relationship in the book in a really natural way, which is something I usually don't find too often in the books I end up picking up by chance (9/10 times the books I grab off the new release section in the library don't give voices to LGBT relationships at all, so this was a nice change).

The book has a nice promising concept, but just needed a little extra uumph--a little more character development, a faster plot in the beginning (I felt like the first bit dragged), and some more aptly-picked prose. I would really only recommend this to those are looking for a light, magical read with some family drama thrown in for good measure.