Shirley J. Adult Fiction Out of the frying pan into the fire
The House of Brides: A Novel by Jane Cockram 384 pages
Miranda has led a good life, a successful life, never wanting for anything. Her mother was a famous author, Tessa Summers, who wrote a best selling history of the women in their family tree who married into the Summers family and lived in the infamous rambling Barnsley House, an estate owned by the family that was chock full of rumor and mayhem. It seems each succeeding generation offered up a worse matriarch within the walls of Barnsley House. The eldest female ancestor on record was a famous crime novelist (where did she get her information for her writing?). Why Miranda's own grandmother killed herself after setting fire to Barnsley House while her children were sleeping! Each woman mentioned in her mother's House of Brides book is worse than the last mentioned. The current wife of her Uncle Max is a celebrity chef and has turned the house into a hotel and put it on the tourist trade maps as a significant culinary must experience. After a social media mishap, Miranda was a media influencer there for a while, tucking her head low and dragging her misgivings with her, Miranda goes home to live with her widowed father for a while to get over her woes. With lots of time on her hands, Miranda gets curious about her mother's family after reading a letter from an unknown cousin. She decides to blow in and visit this mysterious bunch of relatives without so much as I call to let them know she is coming. Oh yes, she deceives her very rich father into giving her his information on one of his charge cards and off she goes into the wild blue yonder to drop in on people she has never once even met nor knew anything of prior. She does a lot of acting on whims throughout the book, but, is somehow not entirely unlikeable in spite of her tendencies to act irrationally. She plops in on them in the middle of the night and not receiving a cordial greeting decides to play along when they think she is someone applying for the nanny job. The story takes off from there. A good first novel by jane Cockram. I recommend this one to high schoolers on up.
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