I am interested in Rosamund Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, but it’s hard to come by in print or audioform, and it’s also pretty long, so I picked this up on Overdrive. It’s a quaint little melodrama about a family going through a significant transition, and about the effects of placing huge responsibility on young people barely out of childhood. It’s also an oddly short book that contains a lot of plot and family details, so it was frankly a little difficult to follow every little moment or handle all the different names at first. But it’s a kind of beach read, but maybe more of a curl up near a fire read, as the book takes place primarily in London and Scotland in middle spring, and includes (as you might have guessed from the title) a blizzard in April that snows the protagonist in.
A 20 year old and her younger brother, recently of a dead father, and a mostly kindly stepfather finds themselves in a kind of self-imposed emotional crisis. The sister has decided to marry a nice enough man (who she doesn’t really love). They take off in a borrowed car fro Scotland to track down their older (hippie) brother and get snowed out in the road, only to be rescued by a Scottish (young, hot) landowner who shows them hospitality. It turns out! that he is their neighbor in London, and they’d actually heard of his plight — his family estate is being bought out by local concerns (owned by his soon to be father in law) and he’s of mixed feelings about it.
So of course a melodramatic romance occurs.
It’s a perfectly nice book, limited in strengths, but sort of answers the question, what if Iris Murdoch had no irony.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Snow-April-Rosamunde-Pilcher-ebook/dp/B00BIV49I4/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1R3VTDNRXW2Z&keywords=snow+in+april+rosamunde+pilcher&qid=1564404664&s=gateway&sprefix=snow+in+april%2Caps%2C246&sr=8-2)