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One Hundred Open Houses (2000)

by Consuelo Saah Baehr(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 5

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English

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review 1: It's rare that I actually laugh out loud at a book, but I did at this one. Baehr's prose is authentic, understated, and flat-out hilarious at times. The self-deprecating humor the protagonist uses throughout the book worked incredibly well, but when it wasn't making me laugh, the prose was brutally honest and touching. Spoiler alert - she references the McLaughlin Group, which I find 83% awesome.So why didn't I give it 5 stars? There were some misspells and missing punctuation that tripped me up. Not even close to the level I have seen in many other books, but still enough to detract from an otherwise fantastic book.I bought this because I loved the concept of the open house and even more, the concept of our home being the keeper of our secrets. If you like plot twists and... more lots of dialogue, this is probably not for you. If, however, you appreciate genuine character development and authentic exposition, pick this up. It's wonderful, and I would recommend it to anyone.
review 2: Apartment-hunting as a journey of the soul! Rebecca Haas dives, quite deliberately, into a Jungian Night Sea Journey characterized less by disconnection than by a fierce determination to rediscover exactly what it is she’s connected to. Herself, for example. She’s long-divorced, her kids are grown, her writing career has stalled and her life is becalmed in a charming seaside village Thomas Kincaid would kill to paint. There’s no reason to think about moving. Except sometimes you have to move, in order to re-member who you are.And so Rebecca begins a savvy and often hilarious tour of New York City real estate, each apartment, condo and mansion a theatrical set reflecting style-of-life possibilities. (For non-New Yorkers actually planning to move there, this book would be a goldmine of insider detail about the “feel” of the city’s various neighborhoods.) But the secret of this novel lies in the unstinting honesty with which Rebecca observes her own history as she anticipates her future. Marriage, children, money. Home repairs, food, a never-to-be-forgotten affair. A parent lost in senility, a corporate event-planning job devoted to the utterly banal, and the faint, fraught possibility of a new lover.Among the many fictional chronicles of women’s lives, this is the most intelligent and sometimes painfully honest I’ve read. An absolute delight. I literally couldn’t put it down and it’s one of the very few I’ll read again, just to find those terrific lines that so frankly reveal things we know or think or suspect or fear, but never tell anybody. less

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