A young girl called Rice goes to stay with Beatrice and her daughter Esther in the Water's Edge hotel in Bournemouth after her single mother dies. As she comes to terms with bereavement and copes with puberty she learns to work in the hotel and forms a relationship with prickly Esther. We learn about the ghosts in the hotel that haunt wheelchair-bound, demented Grandma Maggie.
Tondeur beautifully evokes the naffness of the period. This isn't a hotel, it is a jumped-up guesthouse where the guests must choose their meals for the week when booking in and where the meals all come from tins (the staff have Proper Dinner afterwards). The girls smoke and hang around amusement arcades; Esther studies hairdressing and kisses boys; lesbians abound. Fathers don't.
Tondeur handles relationships well although she seems to avoid credible male characters. There is a lot of awkwardness. No-one is quite comfortable and the interplay of characters is well handled. But, presumably to provide a narration that could describe what no other character could see, she introduces the goddess Persephone who comes from Hell to stay in Bournemouth every spring (the mouth the Hades is underwater, just off the beach). Having a mythical goddess interwoven into the narration made this book very different but it seemed like a bolt on and I was never happy with it.
An interesting but uncomfortable read.
March 2011; 309 pages.
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