To Have and To Hold

The impossibly sweet, perky Alice feels tense and alienated in her marriage to the charming, philandering, controlling, and wealthy Joe. When his firm transfers him from London to New York because of an indiscretion, the couple buy a fixer-upper in the country, where she begins, as it were, to get her groove back. But could she be falling for her best friend's beau? Can Joe reform? Can their marriage endure? Kate Reading's lively interpretation of this romantic fantasy makes the listener believe that all's right with the world. She makes these ordinary people seem more interesting than they deserve, thanks to unflagging energy and the strength of her own vocal personality. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

March 1, 2004
In bestselling British novelist Green's sixth novel, a less-than-perfect London marriage disintegrates stateside. Alice loves her husband, the dashing Joe Chambers, even though he works late and travels a lot—he can be so wonderful (when he's around) and she still can't believe he picked mousy little her. (Of course, he transformed her into a blonde-highlighted, Jimmy Choo–sporting sophisticate first.) Blind to Joe's incessant philandering—even after an office sex act gets him banished to New York—Alice accepts his guilt gifts and hopes for the best. She doesn't want to leave her London life, but she's always loved nature and the rustic life, so Joe buys, in addition to a Manhattan apartment, a house in fictional Highfield, Conn. As the prologue warns, it's not just any house; it belonged to (fictional) 1930s writer Rachel Danbury, whose novel The Winding Road
blew the lid off the town with its saga of infidelities. "Does history repeat itself?" Of course! Green tracks, in great detail, Joe's further infidelities, Alice's dissatisfactions, their fights and reconciliations; she also dips into the POVs of Josie Mitchell (Joe's lover) and Emily, Alice's best friend. Alice is mostly sympathetic, but for someone who thinks of herself as "a post-feminist child of a feminist," she sure bends over backward to please the snake she married. The one plot twist, involving Emily and her beau, Harry, is sweet but predictable. Green's style relies heavily on exposition, and while her prose is clean, her story is padded—kind of like one of those sexy bras that rat Joe likes. 6-city author tour
.