Customer Reviews

Intimate Strangers

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The premise of this book sounded interesting - a house swap between a British couple and a North Carolina couple, neither of whom knew the other. The reading is very slow and tedious but at least the author differentiates each of the many characters in this book. In addition to the principal four people making up the 2 couples, we have kids, nannys, neighbors, bosses, secretaries and friends. That's a lot of characters. A failing marriage dissolves and a good marriage also dissolves - the ending is not very conclusive but probably realistic as the British guy, Oliver, ends up marrying the American girl Christy.

Restless and out-of-sorts, the British Callahans and the American McCarthys attempt to spice up their summer with a trans-Atlantic home-swap. Big mistake. Or is it? In British author Mead's witty novel of marriage gone awry, people have a refreshing resilience.

Christy Callahan, former stockbroker and Southern belle, turned quintessential housewife and mother, is bored with her role and her husband, Gabe, a hapless, talented lawyer whose consuming goal is her happiness.

And Maggie Callahan is full of resentment toward her successful and philandering journalist husband, Oliver, and fears that she may be doomed to tawdry domestication forever. Oliver, a compulsive liar, rather likes his life the way it is.

Christy is the catalyst for change. A fount of energy, Christy takes on the Wiltshire neighborhood and her borrowed house with crusader's zeal. Enchanted by Oliver's eclectic library (entirely inherited unbeknownst to her), she comes across an unpublished novel about his great doomed love affair and becomes obsessed with his passion.

Mead's character depictions, particularly the women, are unsparing without being unsympathetic. While most novels of dysfunctional marriage, no matter how clever, tend to be arid and bleak, this one is absorbing and deliciously ironic, full of unexpected twists and turns.

A delightful and thoughtful book, Mead's American debut, should win her plenty of new fans.

This plot of this book is pretty straight-forward: a British couple and American couple swap their houses for the summer. Living in one another's houses, they become entwined (to various degress, depending on the individual) in each other's lives. As the sumer progresses, their lives begin to unravel and then weave themselves into different shapes. The writing is occasionally intrusive, and one of the four main characters is significantly less well-drawn then the other three; for these reasons, I gave the book only four stars.

_Intimate_Strangers_ is full of thought-provoking situations and events. It avoids an easy or clean ending, leaving the reader to ponder the prognosis for a relationship built on a significant lie. The tagged-on epilogue is laugh-out-loud funny.

Truthfully, I haven't finished reading this book. I am about two-thirds of the way through the book and I am looking forward to seeing how it ends but I also don't want it to end. This book has an interesting concept. Two families from different countries swap their houses for a couple of months. (A bit like Maeve Binchy's "Tara Road" - a brilliant writer) The characters are very real and entertaining. There is a nice mix between the American culture and the English culture. I went to read the reviews on this book to see what other readers had to say. I see there haven't been too many reviews on this book. From what I have read so far, this book is well worth reading.

This is the story of a long distance relationship between two very different people which begins with a very innocent house swaping arrangement. It was very enjoyable and had at least one or two real thought provoking lines including, "...you can't go around messing up somebody's life just because you ge the notion that you love them. No one has that right." (page 148) A good read for the upcoming winter!

The only reason I slogged through this book was to see how it would end. The idea for the storyline was good, but other than that, the book was terrible. You basically have a group of well-to-do people who are not satisfied with what they have and constantly whine and complain about it. The children acted more like adults than the adults did. If you want to read a story about discontentment and infidelity, this book's for you. Otherwise, don't bother.