ULTIMATE LOVE PUZZLE
Finding Mr Right may be easy, but keeping him is a different story altogether, discovers Elena Koshy
ATURE abhors a vacuum. You see that empty black-andwhite grid, and you want to start filling it in. You like to fill up those squares,” enthuses Will Shortz, the
crossword puzzle editor. He’s right. The countless scribbled puzzles swiped from my sisters’ magazines underscores my need to “fill up empty squares” thus earning the wrath of angry women in my household flailing their once pristine magazines in front of my guilty face.
Award-winning copywriter Jeff Bartsch has written a book that incorporates both of my pet subjects — crossword puzzles and romance — and delivers a winner.
brings you Stanley Owens and Vera Baxter, two starcrossed lovers who first meet at 15, at the annual National Spelling Bee where they’re tied for first place, inexorably binding them together in an unlikely partnership that’ll eventually change both of their lives forever.
With ambitious mothers charting the course of their lives, Stanley and Vera struggle to get out of the paths set before them — Stanley a Harvard graduate and potential senator while Vera, who believes maths to be “a playground of the imagination, rich with ideas and fascinating magic,” is to be a mathematics professor. Stanley hatches a scheme to marry Vera in a sham wedding for the nuptial gifts they hope to exchange for cash so that he’d be able to pursue his one true passion: Constructing crossword puzzles. They agree to split the proceeds and move to Cambridge where Vera will enrol as a Radcliffe freshman while Stanley tries to find a job creating crossword puzzles.
The hare-brained scheme might have worked but Stanley hadn’t factored in one extra variable — Vera’s in love with him. Stanley “suspected he had shortcomings in the matters of the heart” — a failing that causes Vera to cut him out of her life several times. Stanley discovers that there are some things in life that are a lot more complicated than solving a puzzle, and that sometimes love can derail the best of plans in a way that no amount of rebellion against Jeff Bartsch
Grand Central Publishing
293 pages THIS slow-burner of a book gives you a peek into the small idyllic coastal town of Rye where the lives and loves of its country folks are played out against the beautiful English setting and the ominous dark clouds of a looming war. I’m not a fan of war stories and any title with the word “War” in it would quickly get me moving onto another book - any book — faster than you can say “Combat!”.
Nevertheless,the deceptively-titled book shines its spotlight on the residents of Rye and their stories. It’s the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, the weather is beautiful and Hugh Grange is taking a respite from his medical studies to visit his Aunt Agatha Kent, one of the town’s leading matrons. At the behest of his aunt, he goes to greet Beatrice Nash of one trunk and several large crates of books to her name. Left penniless by her beloved father, aspiring writer Beatrice takes up the post of a Latin teacher at Rye — a once male-dominated position that is now open to her, thanks to the wily manoeuvrings of the town’s Board of Governors, Hugh’s eccentric aunt.
He finds her “far from the dull spinster overbearing mothers could.
The best parts of are the ubiquitous cleverly coded puzzles that snake through the chapters. The estranged couple periodically reconnects through puzzles where themes and clues chart their relationship stages and point out to where they’re located like a compass, using words and clues from their history together. Crossword enthusiasts will appreciate the puzzles but the die-hard romantics will be eager to solve the biggest puzzle of all: Will Stanley and Vera find their happily ever after?
appoggiatura. Why is that relevant? I don’t know. Nevertheless, it’s an absorbing read with an ending that leaves you cheering and then reaching for the tissues.
Without the crossword puzzles and word play, some parts may not be as emotive as you’d like it to be. And of course there’s Stanley. He’s an idiot. Why do women fall for idiots? It’s an age old puzzle that remains to be solved. he’d been expecting” and muses if the attractive Beatrice would be far from what his Aunt had in mind for a teacher. There’s no great starry-eyed introduction for Hugh and Beatrice, but rather an old fashioned tentative meeting that would take the rest of the book to discover if they’re really meant for each other. After all, practical Beatrice, who in her words, “put away the fripperies of girlhood some years ago”, is hardly a match for the beautiful Lucy Ramsey, a surgeon’s daughter, whom Hugh has planned to propose to.
Romance plays a small part in this book however. It’s more of delving into the workings of the social milieu of the time. You get to know the Kents, their nephews and a host of characters that have their own stories which gets woven into an epic of a tale. From divorces, women’s rights, rape, pregnancy out of wedlock and a host of political and societal boundaries, the book explores it all and tells a whopping story that gets you intrigued even when you’re impatient to find out if Hugh and Beatrice would ever make it to the altar.
Then war arrives; everything changes. People go off to war, die, get injured and suddenly the social fabric that once Helen Simonson
Bloomsbury 580 pages made the town what it was starts to tear. “War makes our needs so much smaller. In ordinary life, I never understood how much pleasure it gives me to see you.” Daniel, Hugh’s cousin puts it so succinctly. The good folks of Rye come to understand through war, what and who is most important to them. The world around them may change violently but sometimes the worst times of your life can herald in some of the finest moments you’d never want to forget.
A typical old-fashioned love story that begs to be read, despite the length. Brilliantly written, I love the family drama, the witty repartee between characters and the insight into the values and social etiquette practised by the people at that time and age.
It’s a long meandering story, with a large number of characters moving in and out of the novel. If you’re anything like me, you’d find it tedious despite the clever dialogue and interesting storyline. Also, there’s Hugh. He’s an idiot. It takes a war and an injury to get him to come to his senses where Beatrice is concerned. Again the age-old question without an answer: Why do women fall for idiots?