A Pink Front Door

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Sometimes all I want from a book is to spend time with some new people, living into their lives and their problems. Not extremely challenging people or dark and twisted problems, just people with enough quirkiness to raise them above the merely mundane, and lift me out of my everyday existence for awhile without making me wrap my head around an utterly different world.

This is such a book, a set of character studies loosely connected with the inhabitants of the house with the pink front door, a charming little place in Hampstead, London in the mid-20th century. Its mistress, Daisy, is prone to “overhelpful-itis,” taking care of an assortment of wastrels and hard-luck cases at the expense of her own family. We meet a number of these, along with some of Daisy's relatives, as their lives entwine and unravel in various interesting (but not overly tortuous) ways.

I ended up smiling at Gibbons's light but vivid way of delineating character, and her amusedly compassionate glance at all these flawed, yet relatable humans. For me it compared favorably to another book I read recently, A Man Called Ove, which aspired to be a similar collection of lovably quirky character studies but fell flat for me; the characterizations did not spring to life. Gibbons did it better, I think.