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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Happy- Go -Lucky,
By K. Dain Ruprecht (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Touch of Mistletoe (Virago Modern Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
I stumbled upon this in a used bookstore, misshelved in the Young Adult section and marked down to a dollar. As I love the Virago Modern Classics series in general, and some of the most interesting books I've read have been misshelved in the Young Adult section, I bought it. I'd never heard of Barbara Comyns but was instantly drawn into this apparently autobiographical novel of the life of an impoverished upper-middle class British girl from the 1920's through the 1960's. And what a life! Our heroine endures an alcoholic mother who forces the family to scrub floors all day long, the arbitrary withholding of her inheritance, a period of near-slavery at a dog kennel in Amsterdam, dire poverty in pre-War London, a model-beautiful sister who finds the perfect rich husband, a marriage to a schizophrenic artist who dies of insulin shock, more dire poverty as a single mother, another marriage to an unrepentant alcoholic who leaves her, The Blitz, a scary and painful illegal abortion, middle-aged quasi-prostitution, and a final marriage to a dull control freak whom she doesn't love. Sound like a grueling slog in the gutter? Well, Comyns makes this all sound like great fun, really. She writes in a breathless, wide-eyed way that, while acknowledging the dark side of life (the killing "mistletoe" of the title), refuses to wallow in it. One could say almost stereotypically British, she brightly bounces on, finding joy in art, friends and family -- generally considering her life a great success. She was either one of these fortunate people blessed with a sanguine temperament, or else found peace enough in her later years to see her youth through rose-colored glasses, I don't know. Either way, I loved reading it.
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