Susan, Goodreads – 5 stars
I loved this book! I couldn’t put it down! It was riveting, like a thriller, but also poetic and thought-provoking. I thought of my many homes. I loved her writing. This is my first Roz Morris.
I’m SO INTO house hunting, I watch House Hunters on HGTV, I read The Hunt in the New York Times every week, I have assisted at least 5 people to find houses or rentals in my area, I sold two houses for my elderly mother, and I looked for years for a rental in my area for her that would “do”. (And yet, I myself, have never bought a house of my own! So sad. I married a man who had a house, and I just rented before that.) No, I’m not a real estate agent, and although I’d love to be in the business, I don’t really like to think of the money aspect of it, the financing.
Enough about me. Roz Morris writes in such a fun way, it’s easily accessible (even if I am American), it’s in the here-and-now, and it just flowed easily! I loved how she used code words for prices (arms and legs) and named all the houses they looked at (and kept looking at). Rusty Tractor, Aardvark (the finest name), Windfall, Chandeliers, etc. For that matter, I love how so many houses in Britain have a name. We are lacking that. And I loved how she kept reminding us where we “met” this person already, or which house this was, it was soooo convenient! She made it so easy to follow, in what was labyrinthine. I kind of didn’t realize that sellers or agents could keep coming back and coming back and coming back, and things could keep changing! And I certainly didn’t realize that sellers could accept an offer and then raise it! WHAT??? Do they do this in the US? In the two houses I helped sell for my mother, we accepted the first offers we got, and they were both willing to pay what we asked, but then they nickel and dimed us down because of presumed faults they’d have to fix. I wish now that we had just been STUBBORN and refused to sell to anyone for anything less than what we asked, and not budged on it. Take it or leave it!! The sad part was that we sold the second house in Dec 2019, just a few months before the pandemic-inducing House Frenzy in Maine. She could have gotten 3 times the price!
Speaking of words in England, we don’t use the word “Exchange” except informally, so I never did quite figure out what it meant in real estate terms in this book. People, of course, sell their house and buy another, and have to work out deals to manage the time differences, but I never heard of any legal thing called “Exchange”. Oh, and the word “gazumped”!!! NEVER HEARD THAT!! I had to check the definition on Kindle. British.
I liked Roz’s sarcastic statements like “Goody.” Or Dave saying, “Tough Titty”. She really is funny, but it was a serious novel at heart. I enjoyed the forays into her childhood home and the mines and the woods–that was cool! I’d have been snooping in that mine in a flash, although being in a tight tunnel gives me the willies. It didn’t take away from the house-hunting. I liked the “essays” about home and what it means, all the incarnations. Her discovery that her father’s mother had been in the Psychiatric Hospital near her house, and she’d passed it a million times…
I was very glad when they stopped being neophytes and got wise. When they said NO. When they saw thru the deceptions.
I loved the parts about the layers of history, ground walked on by many generations, houses lived in by different families, views seen by many different children….it’s mind-boggling.
By the way, I was Team Great Down. That’s the house I was going for. I never got into Windfall, as it was a new build, and I can’t imagine buying a new build in historical England.
Roz Morris, author 