Publication Date: 31st Oct 2023
Genre: Historical (Sliding Door) Fiction, Drama
3.7 Stars
One Liner: Entertaining but drags in the middle
05th Aug 1927
Miss Agnes Humphries, the landlady of No. 23 Burlington Square, has to decide among three prospective tenants for the second floor. It has been empty since the unfortunate death of Mr. Blandford. Agnes has three options –
• Young Clara, her niece, living the glamorous life of a privileged daughter but with hidden pain deep inside her,
• Stephen, the sensible bank clerk who will surely pay the rent on time and seems a little too good to be true and wants something hidden in the past,
• Mercy, a young war widow down, on her luck and running away from her past and the painful life that made things hell.
Each choice will lead to different endings – bittersweet resolution, wrong choice for everyone, and a HEA. How will Agnes choose? As each gets a chance to rent the place in alternative timelines, Agnes may realize things she hadn’t considered before.
The story comes in the third-person POV of the main characters – Agnes, Clara, Stephen, and Mercy.
My Thoughts:
When the book title and cover highlight the house, it should have a prominent part in the plot. I’m happy to report the house indeed has a presence. While some of it may be due to Agnes, you can feel the house.
The house has other tenants- an old Polish musician on the first floor, a mysterious photographer in the attic, and a young and impoverished family with kids in the basement. Each time, the lives of these people are affected differently, though one of them gets a major share. This ensures they don’t remain passive but have an active role in the story.
I like the choice of beginning with Clara since most readers will inevitably root for Mercy. It’s not easy to like Clara, but she will grow on you to an extent. Stephen’s part falls in the middle. Though it has its merits, it weighs down the pacing and makes the book slow. Mercy comes in the last section, finally promising to reveal the secrets hidden until now.
Given the structuring, we have to accept repetition in the timelines. However, a few other details are also repeated, slowing the narration even more. The book could have been less than 400 pages with some tightening (mainly in Clara’s section). Moreover, the setting is 1927, but doesn’t feel like it always.
Despite having specific sections allotted to the three characters, they don’t get in-depth development. This is where you have to go with the flow and not question the convenient changes and coincidences.
We get a few chapters from Agnes’ POV at random, which gives us a glimpse into her life, past, etc. NGL, if I could kick Daphne on her dainty backside, I would.
The book also shows us what really happened and concludes it with an epilogue (yay!) set some years later. The epilogue is bittersweet but beautiful and provides a good ending to the book. (Don’t be too particular about things, though).
To summarize, No. 23 Burlington Square is a heartwarming three-in-one book about how a decision can potentially impact the lives of people belonging to the house. It’s a story of kindness, second chances, and finding one’s tribe.
Thank you, NetGalley and Boldwood Books, for the eARC.
#NetGalley #No23BurlingtonSquare
***
At one place, Agnes talks about a painting of India and mentions temples with onion-shaped domes. I’m not sure what she means here since our temples don’t have rounded domes. The gopurams are sharper and conical (with pointed or cut-off ends). (This is when Agnes is young, so it would be around 1880-1889.) Akshardham Temple in Delhi has a sort of domes, but it was completed in 2005.
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