Customer Reviews

Starlight

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This book starts out with a description of two elderly sisters living in comfortable poverty in a small post-war English town. It starts off slow, and I wondered if the story would ever really grab me.

The real star here isn't the plot though, but Gibbons' deft and witty characterizations. The two sisters--one kind but afflicted with logorrhea, the other infirm and timid, the solid vicar and his intellectually gifted but emotionally stunted curate, the mysterious new landlords and their inscrutable daughter, the mad old man living in the attic who calls himself by a new name each month, the pug-loving elderly heiress. Gibbons has the best grasp of human nature of almost any author I've ever read; her characters are never idealized but always flawed, earthy, selfish, and sympathetic. Her books are like Barbara Pym's except less dreary and funnier, and her characters all practice a zealous, even manic pursuit of their own happiness.