Vittoria Cottage

This is such a strange book. If it wasn't for the talk about cars and telephones and World Wars, I could've thought it was set in the late Victorian era, which I guess is kinda the point. This is actually set just after WW2.

Caroline Dering is a pretty interesting protagonist. I frowned at her submissiveness and she often comes off as lacking agency or the will to make any decisions on her own, but then when you actually take a step back and look at the big picture - she does do a lot of things on her own successfully. She does take charge of her family and her household, and she does put her foot down when necessary. Leda is annoying and spoiled and selfish as shit, but she also displays an unexpected common sense when she encourages Derek Ware to keep at his degree. Derek is still irredeemably annoying.

The book has a surprising number of touching insights about life, especially seen from the eyes of middle-aged people, who are the protagonists of this book after all. One such example is when Mr Shepperton ruminates about how everything is transient in life, both joy and sorrow, and no matter what ordeal or what immense happiness one is going through, one eventually moves through it into a placid neutrality in the end.

Some complaints I have that I could perhaps close one eye to because of the time period it was written in, but which still rubbed me the wrong way. There are some casual racist comments in this one, although somewhat to be expected of books in this era. Luckily, they were only very brief and rare fleeting mentions and wasn't expounded into. What I wasn't a fan of was how much everyone kept fat-shaming Comfort Podbury, the Dering's help. It was already mentioned that Comfort possibly had some medical issues with her thyroid causing her weight gain and perhaps that is a call for compassion, but we are still treated to some truly awful and uncomfortable statements made by the characters about her size. At least there were those who were more compassionate towards Comfort, like Caroline and Bobbie Dering, who tried to encourage Comfort to seek medical attention for her thyroid issue instead of sweeping things under the carpet. Even so, there were still moments when even they were tempted to laugh at Comfort or talk about how slow she is. All in all, she's depicted as good-natured, dependable, but a bit of a comedic figure and the comedy is all based on her size. While I suppose I'm not too surprised about the treatment of Comfort's character given the time period this was written, it's still a little uncomfortable to read in this moment.

The ending was also so abrupt! After all that, we didn't get to see the final reunion scene between Caroline and Robert? Also what happened with Leda? She just disappeared to her aunt's farm and that's it? It's probably deliberate but it really felt like nobody got any resolution here. The “good” people aren't rewarded adequately (Caroline, James, Bobbie), and the “bad” people aren't punished or redeemed (Leda, Derek). I know books do that deliberately, but it just didn't feel like that kind of book to me.