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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Family saga - it takes all types - fascinating!, 23 Aug 2009
Love All
Persephone (Percy) ends a relationship and goes back to live with her beloved aunt, Florence, a talented landscape gardener, with whom she had spent most of her childhood.
Thomas is a widower with a small child, Harriet (Hatty). When his wife, Celia, died, he fell apart. Francis is Celia's brother. Mary, Thomas' sister looks after Thomas, Hatty and Francis.
Jack Curtis, self-made man of means, buys the country home that used to belong to Thomas and Mary's parents, and where they both spent their childhood. He hires Florence to landscape the neglected gardens and restore them to their former glory.
There is a fascinating interplay between these and other characters as events unfold.
The characters are believable, although occasionally I would like to have given one of them a good shaking!
Selfishness, indecision, devotion to duty, unrequited love, true love and committment, warmth, generosity, meanness - it is all there - and it makes for a very good read.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If in doubt, dont!, 15 Oct 2009
I loved Elizabeth Jane Howard's earlier books and looked forward to getting my hands on `Love All' but, in the event, it was so nondescript I had to force myself to finish it. The plot was implausible and I could find no sympathy or liking for any of the characters who were so poorly drawn that many of them `morphed' into one, or at best two! I checked back constantly to see who they were and where they fitted in, much as I would for a Solzenitsyn novel but for different reasons. Even the main characters who, amazingly, all appeared to have been orphaned or deserted as children, were flat and one-dimensional whilst others were irrelevant to the rather hackneyed plot and seemed to be there purely for makeweight'. There were many irritants, such as the laboured references to Persephone's 'Greekness':her fluency in the language, her love of Greek restaurants and food, but most of all, Retsina, but then, she had spent some of her early childhood with her grandparents in Greece before going to school in England and never returning to Greece. All in all, a huge disappointment and I was left wondering if Elizabeth Jane Howard had actually written this book which seems to have been published merely to cash in on her former popularity. If I could have given it 'no stars' I would have.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Potentially fascinating but a disappointment, 28 Oct 2009
For anyone who enjoys stories about relationships, this could have been a wonderful read. Sadly it isn't. I say sadly because Elizabeth Jane Howard is an excellent, descriptive writer. I often think that stories told from multiple viewpoints, as this one is, suffer because you never really get to know any of the characters intimately. As a result you never really care what happens to them. This story is told from so many viewpoints that, for the first hundred pages or so, if you put the book down you'll have forgotten who everybody is by the time you take it up again.
Of the many, there are two main characters. Percy (real name Persephone), a young woman whose parents neglected her from an early age and who was brought up by her Aunt Florence (Floy), and Mary, who moves to Devon and persists in sacrificing her own happiness to look after her brother Thomas and his daughter Harriet (Hatty). Hatty was three years old when Thomas's wife Celia is killed in a car crash. Celia's brother Francis, an unemployed artist, moves in to live with them too, in an old farmhouse close to Melton House, the old manor where Thomas and Mary grew up. This is now owned by Jack Curtis, a self-made businessman who has spent thousands restoring it and who employs Floy to restore the gardens.
How their lives inevitably start to intertwine is the central thread of the story, and it could have been a fascinating read. But apart from occasional brilliant glimpses, you never really know what the characters actually feel about events taking place in and around their lives. It was if I was just an onlooker, with someone else telling me that this and that happened. For me, Floy was the only interesting or colourful personality even though so few chapters were written from her viewpoint. Everyone else seemed dull and lifeless, and most of them seemed to have lost their parents in a car crash, or been ignored by them.
Added to this, there was a bevy of minor characters. Some, like Mrs Quantock who chaired the local council meetings, had their place in the story, but didn't, I felt, warrant whole chapters from their viewpoints. There was Mrs Fanshawe whom Jack Curtis had employed as a housekeeper, Richard Connaught, a retired admiral whose daughter Rosalie became pregnant and was then abandoned, and there was Reggie, Francis and Celia's father. Then there was someone called Hugo who appeared periodically but who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the story.
Despite its flaws, there were some compelling moments (to describe them would spoil the story for those who might still read it). I quite enjoyed the book but it was hardly a page-turner that I couldn't bear to leave. I was disappointed in the ending too, and had foreseen what was going to happen some way before it happened. If you've not read any of this author's works I wouldn't start with this one. It's probably her weakest.
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