Rate this book

De Koffer Van Mevrouw Sinclair (2014)

by Louise Walters(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

A.W. Bruna

review 1: What a wonderful first novel.The dual time line of Dorothy in ww2 to Roberta of the present day who works in an old and new bookshop.I was engrossed and could not put this down.For anyone who loves books and the odd find inside that the previous reader has left behind.This is the story of Dorothy who now is in a nursing home and it's her granddaughter Roberta who unravels the mystery of the letters left in Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase.I loved it!
review 2: This was Kate Morton meets Bridget Jones, with a questionable need for that second component. The blurb is surprisingly accurate, as the shock waves of Dorothy’s decisions do indeed only “touch” her granddaughter’s life; they don’t shatter or even dent it a little. Which is why I question the Roberta cha... morepters, which read like chick lit. I have nothing against chick lit, but after the first two chapters, it was clear that I was reading two separate stories. So I dropped one and focused on the other, and that’s how I finished this in the bookstore.That I skimmed to the end says a lot about the book’s readability (not to mention my need to know what Dorothy did, exactly). Unfortunately, it doesn’t have much emotional depth. After the opening chapter, Roberta never even talks about the other old letters, the collection of which is supposedly one of her hobbies. These letters open the Roberta chapters, but while they could have added poignancy to the whole story, a story about women’s lives, they just became an empty recurring motif. As a first-person narrator, Roberta seems to immerse herself in her own life so that she doesn’t have to think about her family. This is pretty credible, if you ask me, but it makes her a thoroughly unreliable bridge to the past. Her tone is too “lite” next to the narration in the Dorothy chapters.Those chapters were the book’s strength, but for some reason the author (or her editors?) didn’t have enough confidence in them. Mrs. Compton was particularly successful because Walters timed our discovery of her depth of character so well, and the climactic scenes in the cottage finally gave me some of the bittersweetness I had been craving. If Walters’ attention hadn’t been spread so thin across such separate stories (and don’t get me started on dual narratives!), more of it could have been given to other characters in these chapters – the relationships between them are much more interesting than those in the other ones. Even Mrs. Dorothy Sinclair herself remains a cipher, but that might be because I was reading so fast.It seems that, in an attempt to portray women and girls in all their infinite variety at once, the book welcomed too many characters and thus left whole relationships unexplored. Roberta’s mother, for instance, serves only as a parallel to Nina from the Dorothy chapters and, together with Nina, as a counterweight to Dorothy. If those connections sound interesting, you can imagine how much I wish the author had actually delved into them. less

Download links for: De koffer van mevrouw Sinclair

Advertising