|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Poor Linda is bored to tears. She is rich and attractive. She is loved and trusted. She has the freedom to do whatever she wants. How can she possibly make a satisfying life out of all this? She decides to take a job. Without job skills, Linda finds few possibilities in the want ads. She applies for a job as companion to a charming elderly lady. She is accepted immediately, and here the suspense starts. Why does her employer Mrs. Bates seem so frightened of her klutzy young nephew Peter that she is stampeded into hiring Linda as soon as he appears? For that matter, there are the not-so-pleasant young twins and their mother, Mrs. Bates' sister-in-law, who seems a tigress on their behalf. Also part of this family group are Gertrude, the loyal long-time maid with an amazing unlucky streak; and Mrs. Bates' friend General Barthemeles, who quickly becomes Linda's ally. Minor accidents keep occurring that seem to threaten Mrs. Bates, and no one in the family wants to think about them. When Linda shows an interest in solving this puzzle, Mrs. Bates sets her to work arranging a group migration from London to Corfu so she won't have time to think about it. The stratagem backfires, however, because Linda discovers in the process that she does have some very marketable job skills, and she also gets to know the ambiguous nephew Peter far better than Mrs. Bates would have liked if she knew. This is the love story, a sweet and funny one. I still laugh when I think of an especially memorable tryst on shipboard. Linda's bid to make something satisfying of her life is bound to be a complete success. Roberta Gellis is modest about A DELICATE BALANCE, but it is a delightful little read with a mature sense of humor. Certain slapstick incidents would have been heavy-handed if written by many romance authors; Gellis treats them with light affection and makes them some of the most unforgettable scenes in the book. Her peripheral characters are not explored as deeply in BALANCE as in her longer, historical romances, but they always interact consistently with the psychology the author has chosen for them. It gives to the emotional conflicts an authentic quality missing in most romance novels. This mystery is not a difficult one to solve, but the emotional background of the miscreant is completely believable, and so are the questionable interactions of the other members of the group. If Roberta Gellis is going to be republishing more of her lapsed works as ebooks, she might be reason enough in herself to get an ebook reader.
Reviewed by Joy Calderwood, September 2002
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
