Way Home

If you like intelligent British women writers, you'll like Alexandra Raife, who writes more or less in the Rosamunde Pilcher style, although not quite as heartwarming or memorable.Anyway, "The Way Home" is another of Raife's pleasing Scottish novels, this one the story of three very different sisters who find themselves uncomfortably together in their ancestral home upon the death of their much-disliked stepmother. It has been six years since proper upper-class housewife Vanessa, maverick Jamie, who has emigrated to the U.S., and much-younger, dumpy and silent Phil have been together. They find they have inherited their beloved family home, Calder, but are horrified to find the ugly and disfiguring changes to the fine old estate that their late stepmother has wrought.Now they must make some heavy decisions about what to do with the house, how to divide the spoils, whether or not to sell, and all kinds of other practical and emotional matters. The problem is that each of the sisters is at a personal crisis in her life, and none of them is able or willing to share these crises with the others.The most well-rounded of the sisters is Jaime, who escaped her unhappy childhood to build a successful PR business in Seattle. But something big is troubling her--and the reader learns her problems before she can bring herself to share with her sisters. Vanessa, so brittle and shallow on the outside, is in an equally desperate situation, one that she cannot even admit to herself. And Phil, the "baby" who is nevertheless in her thirties, will not let either of her two sisters even close to her own secret.This book is lovely--a solid read and a good story. It's not great literature, nor was it meant to be--but it's a heartwarmer nevertheless. Recommended.