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By Stella Gibbons Penguin 400 pages |
By Comrade Reviewer Overcoat
Those readers expecting another Cold Comfort Farm should stop right here. The nightingales lack the sly wit and imagination of Flora Poste, and one will certainly find nothing nasty in the woodshed here. More’s the pity. However, for lovers of light romance, who shun the tawdry covers and cheap paper of Harlequins and Silhouettes, and who would not be caught in a woodshed with Sweet Savage Love, Nightingale Wood fits the bill. It is tasteful, amusing, and lightly funny. Daughters and a daughter-in-law run around, struggling with their repressed bosoms at The Eagles grim family home of Mr. Withers and the women of the family. The Eagles and its gardens function as an architectural externalization of Mr. Withers, his utter lack of imagination coupled with his overweening need for control. In short dullness is the order of the day. As Gibbons notes,
It is difficult to make a dull garden, but old Mr. Wither had succeeded. . . . The result was a poorish lawn and a plaster rockery . . . a lot of boring shrubs. Mr. Wither also liked the garden to look tidy, and on a fine April morning he stood at the breakfast-room window thinking what a nuisance the daisies were. There were eleven of them out in the middle of the lawn. Saxon must be told to get them up.
In short, The Eagles under Mr. Wither’s watchful eyes is not the ideal place for two young daughters (ages 35 and 39) and one daughter-in-law and former shop girl (age 21) to contain their amorously heaving (yet repressed) bosoms.
