A story of love, friendship, betrayal and incest. Equally reminiscent of The Age of Innocence or The Talented Mr Ripley , a chance encounter reveals the truth about a tragic accident years before.From the Hardcover edition.
This was a coming of age story, set in the 1950s, about a young college girl named Kate. She starts out extremely innocent and throughout the book she learns about humanity with an emphasis on men. She starts out a sheltered girl from Kansas who gets the opportunity to travel to Europe with a group of girls from her college. One of the girls, Olivia, has a brother, Hugo, whom Kate falls in love with. Hugo invites the group to accompany him home to Egypt for four days before rejoining their group in Venice. During the course of this trip to Egypt Kate loses one of her friends which is the trigger for Kate becoming an adult. Kate also learns many awful things about Hugo.
Overall, while I enjoyed the writing style (very classical, it flowed nicely), I found the story to be a bit dull. It really dragged on and not a whole lot happened. I would have liked a bit more description of the places she visited and just a bit more depth in general. Not a very memorable read and not recommended.
A well written read that has a few plot twists and delivers an unexpected punch in terms of characters, story and moral discussion. I really enjoyed this and was pleasantly surprised at how pacy it was.
I really like old fashioned novels and this was definitely old fashioned - set in the US, Europe and Egypt in the 1950's with plenty of suspense and intrigue.