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Title: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Author: Helen Simonson
Genre: Contemporary literature, verging on romance
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A widower British gentleman falls in love with the Pakistani shopkeeper in his small village, much to the shock and dismay of everyone around them.
Thingummies: A sweetly charming book about love, prejudice, and second chances, all in fine dry British humor. It's not quite your typical romance novel, but I feel like it has many of the best attributes of the genre.
Major Pettigrew's own biases--about race, class, and generation--come crashing down around his ears when he falls for a intelligent, slightly snarker widow who happens to be Pakistani. His fellow villagers and remaining family hardly approve. She has plenty of problems of her own, with a highly traditional family who has their own expectations of her.
This easily could have slid into something nastily, quietly racist or into something offensively "PC". I am aware that my own privileges might blind me a bit her, but I think the author does a fine job of balancing. Both the people of Pakistani and English descent include some lovely people, some truly appalling people, some who mean well but completely bungle their intentions because of their blinders, and some who surprise you in the end. In both cases, we see how blindly following tradition and propriety can lead to hateful outcomes and how blindly chasing after modern baubles does no better. In several cases, people act quite counter to how one might expect them to, making the reader question some basic stereotypes.
But it's not a do-gooder conscious-raising book at its heart. What it is essentially is a sweet little tale about people setting aside their old destructive habits to find new, better ways of living. The sympathetic characters are flawed but loveable, the unsympathetic ones are fun to hate, and the redeemable ones make you want to strangle them until they redeem themselves. Not all is perfect, no one is is completely right. But they try the best they can. It's a love story.
That happens to contain some fantastically snarky lines.
Author: Helen Simonson
Genre: Contemporary literature, verging on romance
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A widower British gentleman falls in love with the Pakistani shopkeeper in his small village, much to the shock and dismay of everyone around them.
Thingummies: A sweetly charming book about love, prejudice, and second chances, all in fine dry British humor. It's not quite your typical romance novel, but I feel like it has many of the best attributes of the genre.
Major Pettigrew's own biases--about race, class, and generation--come crashing down around his ears when he falls for a intelligent, slightly snarker widow who happens to be Pakistani. His fellow villagers and remaining family hardly approve. She has plenty of problems of her own, with a highly traditional family who has their own expectations of her.
This easily could have slid into something nastily, quietly racist or into something offensively "PC". I am aware that my own privileges might blind me a bit her, but I think the author does a fine job of balancing. Both the people of Pakistani and English descent include some lovely people, some truly appalling people, some who mean well but completely bungle their intentions because of their blinders, and some who surprise you in the end. In both cases, we see how blindly following tradition and propriety can lead to hateful outcomes and how blindly chasing after modern baubles does no better. In several cases, people act quite counter to how one might expect them to, making the reader question some basic stereotypes.
But it's not a do-gooder conscious-raising book at its heart. What it is essentially is a sweet little tale about people setting aside their old destructive habits to find new, better ways of living. The sympathetic characters are flawed but loveable, the unsympathetic ones are fun to hate, and the redeemable ones make you want to strangle them until they redeem themselves. Not all is perfect, no one is is completely right. But they try the best they can. It's a love story.
That happens to contain some fantastically snarky lines.
