House of Trelawney

December 15, 2019
An eccentric family of British aristocrats, their decaying ancestral home, and the financial crash of 2008 are the ingredients of Rothschild's (The Improbability of Love, 2015, etc.) romantic/comic fairy tale. Downton Abbey has nothing on 800-year-old Trelawney Castle with its four miles of hallways, a room for each day of the year, and 85 members of staff. But that was in its heyday. Now Kitto, the future 25th Earl of Trelawney, is on his financial uppers, presiding over a freezing, crumbling semi-ruin. His wife, Jane, has sunk her own money into the castle but is still struggling to feed herself, their three children, and Kitto's aging parents, the current earl and countess. Kitto's sister Blaze, a talented stock picker at a London hedge fund, does have some money, but her company has just been bought by ruthless opportunist Thomlinson Sleet, which puts her in jeopardy. The plot starts to move when Jane and Blaze receive letters from their old college friend Anastasia, now dying and asking them to care for her daughter, Ayesha. The banking crisis swallows Kitto's remaining money, and Jane kicks him out. After a family death, Blaze comes to the castle's rescue, although she's distracted by an on-and-off love affair with much nicer hedge fund squillionaire Joshua Wolfe. Rothschild writes well about these elite milieus, but hers is a broad, pantomime-ish tale stocked with simple, one-dimensional characters: flabby villain Sleet; indefatigably decent, endlessly deferred Wolfe; tirelessly sneery oldest son Ambrose. The flow is uneven--Kitto disappears for half the story; Blaze is exhaustingly inconsistent--and the book is both long and weakly paced. Trelawney does, however, finally get the upgrade it needs, and its dysfunctional family may be positioned for a sequel. Deft narration fails to eclipse the inherent shortcomings in this patchy satire of entitlement (literally) with sentimental touches.

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January 1, 2020
The tangled expanse of Trelawney Castle and the surrounding quagmire of its gardens and grounds have withstood hundreds of years of royal excesses, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kitto Trelawney, its most recent heir, stands to lose it all. The global financial crisis has further reduced the dwindling family fortune to a mere pittance. With the castle crumbling at the slightest gust of wind, Kitto flees, leaving his long-suffering wife, Jane, to care for their three children, his doddering parents, and ancient Aunt Tuffy, an entomologist. Banished by the laws of primogeniture and forced to make her way in London, Kitto's sister, Blaze, a financial titan with a penchant for unpopular predictions, foresees the international monetary crisis, but fails to anticipate falling in love with her closest competitor. Into this volatile mix comes Ayesha, the voluptuous daughter of their long-estranged friend, Anastasia, bearing a secret that will fell the Trelawney family tree. For all its Fawlty Towers froth, Rothschild's (The Improbability of Love, 2015) comedy of manners and manors belies a sobering tale of friendship and loyalty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2019

With literally hundreds of rooms and four miles of corridors, Trelawney Castle has stood on 500,000 acres in Cornwall for over 700 years. Now tumbling down, it's home to the heir, Kitto; his elderly parents; his wife, Jane, and their children; and Kitto's financial whizz of a sister, Blaze. The unexpected arrival of teenaged Ayesha, daughter of the estranged Anastasia, forces everyone to reconsider what really binds this family together. From the author of the Baileys Women's Prize finalist The Improbability of Love.

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