Love in Idleness
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In her delightful reimagining of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Amanda Craig slyly serves up a witty cross-cultural farce, a modern-day tale of love and lies set against the magical landscape of Tuscany.
When Theo, a workaholic lawyer, his English wife Polly, and their two children rent an idyllic Italian villa, they expect a relaxing summer holiday together. Polly, with her loved ones’ romantic interests at heart, has invited an eccentric mix of friends and family along--including three eligible bachelors, a former model, an Indian-British divorcee with a young son, and her own appalling mother-in-law. They soon discover the Casa Luna is a strange, enchanted place where people find their heart's desire—but at a price. Everyone falls in love, though not with the people they expect, and the results are surprising and hilarious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lighthearted romp, Craig's second novel to be published in the U.S. (after In a Dark Wood), Theo, a successful American businessman residing in London with his wife, Polly, and their son and daughter, Robbie and Tania, rent a house in Tuscany for a two-week vacation. With match-making intentions, they invite seven friends, including an Indian-British divorc e, Hemani, with a young son, Bron; former model Ellen; three eligible bachelors; and, most formidable of all, Theo's starchy mother. At the end of the first week, Polly is doing all the work, her relationship with Theo is crumbling, the hoped-for romances are not materializing and the three youngsters are fighting with one another. Only the owner of the house, a "W. Shade," is absent. The vacation appears to be a failure, but something of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream haunts the lush forest nearby, especially when Tania, with the advice of sparkle-sized fairy folk, prepares and administers a potion to the adults. The romantic entanglements that ensue might flummox even Shakespeare; one is not between a previously argumentative couple at all, but between two men, one of whom is Theo. Craig is perhaps too leisurely about introducing the quasi-fantasy element, but it works, and when the mysterious W. Shade finally arrives, he is in for a romantic surprise of his own. This is amusing, featherweight stuff, and readers who love to see posh vacationers gamboling about in Italy will eat it up.
