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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - The Empty House
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List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $7.99
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780312961275
ISBN: 0312961278
Label: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 249
Publication Date: 1996-12-15
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Studio: St. Martin's Paperbacks
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Editorial Reviews:
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When you read a novel by Rosamunde Pilcher you enter a special world where emotions sing from the heart. A world that lovingly captures the ties that bind us to one another-the joys and sorrows, heartbreaks and misunderstandings, and glad, perfect moments when we are in true harmony. A world filled with evocative, engrossing, and above all, enjoyable portraits of people's lives and loves, tenderly laid open for us...
At twenty-seven, Virginia Keile had been through the most intense experiences life had to offer-a magical first love ending in heartbreak, a suitable marriage, motherhood, and widowhood. All she wanted now was to take her daughter and son to a seaside cottage and help them recover. But Virginia's true love was there, waiting, hoping, praying that this time she would be strong enough to seize happiness.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Woman without a Spine...film at eleven!
Comment: ...is an alternative title for this story of a pampered, simpering woman who changes her whole life because a man she hardly knows tells her she should. As a teenager Virginia is attracted to a young farmer she sees twice...once when he brings her a cup of tea at a party and once when she bumps into him in town and he buys her an icecream. She hopes he will ask her out, but domineering MUM gets wind of the potential boyfriend and whisks Virginia back to London, where she hopes to find a rich husband for the girl. She also forgets to tell Virginia that the boy left a phone message. Plot thickens? Nope, but it does curdle. Anyhoo, Virginia feels abandoned by her farmerboy, so she marries a rich and titled young man who conveniently dies after about five years, leaving Virginia rich, titled and still stupid. The marriage, the two children, the five years they live in Scotland are reduced to one paragraph. All we know about this period of time is that Virginia was Not Happy. She was Not UNhappy, but she felt melancholy. Nanny was raising the children, Husband was busy with work, the servants ran the estate, she just sat around and drank tea and looked wan. Anyway, hubby shuffles off the mortal coil and Virginia immediately dumps the kids and their nanny with her mother in law and hightails it out to visit friends in the country, where she apparently plans to sit and sip tea on the lawn forever. Virginia is not much of a go-getter, as go-getters go. But wait...suddenly from across lawns and meadows and fields, Virginia spots a man on a tractor and instantly recognizes him as Eustace--her first love. The woman has eyes like a pair of Bushnell Field Spotters with Nightvision. Having spotted Eustace (yes, that's his name. Why? To annoy me, probably) she falls immediately in love again and gallops over to say Howdeedo, I'm back Baby! However Eustace just scolds her for leaving her kids with her mother in law and for staying with friends. He tells her to get her own place NOW and bring back the kids NOW. Virginia does not tell him to mind his own beeswax, although every other woman on the planet would have turned on her heel and strode out the door, crying "Bite me" over her shoulder. Instead Virginia gallops off to rent a totally unsuitable dank and dirty house without kitchen, with no place for the kids to sleep, then she gallops off to London without even telling her remarkably patient hostess she's leaving.(No, Virginia doesn't have a horse. I want you to picture her, on foot, gallumphing from place to place, visions of Hot Little Eustaces dancing in her head). The train journey is a nightmare. Why? Because this woman is a moron. She can't so much as order a cup of tea on the train without it become an ordeal, or figure out how to find a seat. Juice is spilled on her, her scarf becomes wrinkled, she drops her luggage, she grows hungry but cannot figure out how to get food and...and...and people are rude (yes, rude, there I've said it). This is a 30-year-old well-traveled, educated woman taking a two hour train ride. In London. In the 1980s. She's not taking the El Suicido Express to Timbuktu, for Pete's Sake. The simple act of sitting on a train for 100 miles leaves her shaking and about to swoon...not to mention juice stained. Anyway, she races to the Mom in Laws, grabs the kids, fires poor old Nanny on the spot (Thank you for all those years of faithful service, for loving my children and raising them...and don't let the door hit you in the butt when you leave.) She drives off into the country to make A New Life For Them All(also known as Nail Eustace). The kids arrive at the house and she can't fix them any food, of course, because there are no cooking facilities...but she can't cook anyway, so what the heck. They chew some crusts and fall, exhausted into bed. The book would have ended with Virginia and kids dying of starvation, but fortunately Eustance shows up. He smiles at Virginia's incompetence. "Silly woman I will teach you to light the stove and make tea." He is pleased that she is helpless and docile and has followed his advice to the letter so he agrees to marry her (and get his meathooks into all those millions she inherited from Hubby No. 1). And everybody lived happily ever after. Especially Eustace, who probably isn't doing much farming any more...you KNOW she didn't get him to sign any pre-nup. I know a lot of people like Rosamund Pilcher, but take it from me, if you like "cozy" style novels about the English countryside, read Marcia Willett. Her stories are better, her characters are three dimensional, their problems hit home, and you don't want to crack them in the head with a croquet mallet half way through the book. Ms. Willett can write rings around Ms. Pilcher. Start with A Summer In the Country.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I love Rosamund Pilcher
Comment: This is a lovely short read about unrequited love that finally finds its way home to it's lovely end. Worthwhile reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Romance-by-numbers; Cornwall is the star
Comment: Cornwall, one of Rosamund Pilcher's favorite places, is a place of spiritual renewal in The Empty House. Virginia Kiele's problems are not what they might seem: she is a young widow whose husband died suddenly in a car crash, leaving her with two young children. Her mother in law and nanny are looking after the children while Virginia spends some time with a kind family friend in a beautiful house in Cornwall. But Virginia does not particularly mourn her husband. What she wants is to take charge of her own children. Her situation isn't one that most of us will be able to relate to. The in-charge nanny that raised her husband has, with her mother-in-law's blessing, taken her children in hand, and Virginia has literally never cared for her own children without help. She seizes on the idea that this is what she, and they need - to rent a house in Cornwall and begin to form their own family unit. The title refers to both the house in Scotland she left behind, as well as the long-vacant rental she decides to make into a home. The added attraction is a handsome Cornish man with the improbably unromantic name of Eustace whom she knew briefly on a long-ago holiday. Will they be able to connect after so many years and so many changes?
The Empty House is a short but fairly satisfying novel. Not being able to empathize with the main character was a minus, but she's a good character nonetheless. The romance proceeded predictably enough, but Pilcher created strong enough characters that I wished them well.
Pilcher fans will enjoy this book, but it's a weak place to start her body of work. Try Coming Home or Winter Solstice instead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Revel in Rekindled Love on the Beaches of Cornwall
Comment: Many years before THE SHELL SEEKERS propelled Rosamunde Pilcher to international fame, she wrote a string of romantic tales to satisfy a hungry heart. THE EMPTY HOUSE is, in my opinion, one of the more endearing.
Virginia Keile had a magical first love that ended in heartbreak. She later married a handsome socialite and bore two adorable children. Yet, the memory of that lost first love haunted her for ten long years. After her husband's tragic death, Virginia returns once again to the English seaside and seeks to find out why Eustace Phillips rejected her.
Pilcher, famous for her cozy descriptions of English life and beloved for the ambience she creates in her novels, does not fail us in this one. We move between the exquisite Cornwall home where Virginia is a guest to the Scottish manor she has left behind as well as Bosithick, the empty house in Cornwall that she makes her own.
How Virginia learns to assert herself, to take control of her own children away from her strong-minded mother-in-law and the family nanny, makes for a light and entertaining reading experience. The reader is not only transported to Pilcher's idyllic Cornwall with all its magic, but to a woman's first love and the path to recapturing a past she could never forget.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Love wins in the end
Comment: Another Rosamunde Pilcher story where events slowly, but inexorably, after a major detour, lead the protagonist, onto a point where she allows true love to enter her life.
Virginia Parsons meets her true-love-to-be, Eustace Philips, when she is seventeen during a holiday in Cornwall. She wants to pursue the relation, but her ambitious mother has other plans and bundles her off to London, in effect, squashing the relationship in the bud. Virginia is married off to the rich and stylish Anthony Kylie. Ten years and two children later, Anthony dies in a car accident, and Virginia returns to Cornwall, presumably for a holiday. Quite soon, she meets the still unattached Eustace, who provokes her into taking charge of her life and not let others run it for her. Virginia does so, she finds a place to stay near Eustace, dismisses the nurse who has tended her children since birth and takes charge of them herself. It does not take long before she meets Eustace and the proverbial happy ending ensues.
This story may be hard to believe, but Rosamunde Pilcher, with her inimitable and subtle narrative style, manages to carry it off and lend to the tale, a strong dose of credibility. According to her, the greatest virtue is to be true to yourself, in that clothing, true love and passion can reveal itself. In her novels, the villains present a false front, which they are always trying to live upto. Because we all instinctively know these simple truths, reading a Pilcher novel is extremely refreshing like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter day. One resonates at once.
Great Reading.
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