Pretty brisk pace. Complicated mother-daughter relationships that add depth to the characters. A spunky old-lady neighbor is a little out of central casting, and the prose itself a bit flat. An engaging diversion that would probably not compel me to seek out more of the author's work. ( )

A predictable yarn that nevertheless kept me interested until the end. Nan McNamara is the narrator.
3 stars. ( )

I picked this off the shelf at the library because I liked the title. Imagine my surprise when an old woman featured in one of the lead roles. The secret to invisibility is to be a middle-aged woman; that’s when it starts, by the time you’re over 50 almost no one ever notices you. Mina, the woman in the story, certainly knows this. I liked her a lot and felt a great sympathy for how people treated her, something I’m careful about when dealing with my own aging parents. Despite their frailty, memory lapses or illness, most elderly people are still fully-functioning adults. Treating them like children does them a huge disservice and many of them get run roughshod because they lack the energy for confrontation.

Anyway, the writing was fluid and occasionally insightfully funny like when Mina is touring a retirement community (against her wishes) with her nephew and is feeling pretty down about the general decrepitude of the people so far when she turns a corner and finds that it isn’t “all shuffle and nap”. The underlying plot though, is easy to spot. Clearly someone or a team of someones wants people out of their homes so that the valuable real estate can be had on the cheap and turned into big profits. The question is who is dirty dealing. Again, it’s not too hard to spot the villain if you’re used to books with red herrings and people who are too good to be true. Enjoyable though and I’ll read more of Hallie Ephron if I can find more. ( )

The story is set in a section of the Bronx full of history as an aging neighborhood is being overtaken by a company intent on demolishing its homes.

When Sandra Ferrante is hospitalized, her daughter Evie comes home to clean up her mother's home, only to be confronted by a mess beyond her wildest dreams. In addition to the alcoholism that is killing her mother, it now appears that Sandra Ferrante has become a hoarder. Evie reacquaints herself with her mother's neighbors, especially Mina Yetner, whose nephew is encouraging her to move to a nursing home. There are a lot of secrets in this small neighborhood and Evie is thrust into the middle of them as tries to determine who she can trust.

Although there is suspense to this story, it centers more around the future of the neighborhood. "There Was An Old Woman" is not the creepy, scary story I imagined, nor is it the terrifying web of deception and madness the back cover advertises. These two negetives would have generally made me take this with a grain of salt...not my usual type of book. However I couldn't stop reading it. I enjoyed Ephron's writing, which was easily readable, and only wish that some of her plots - especially the subplot centering around an historic event that Mina witnessed were more developed.

Don't let the fact that it's not the usual type of suspense put you off reading this. ( )

Good book. Although I knew from the start who some (not all) of the baddies were, I was in suspense about how many lives would be destroyed before they were discovered. The characters were mostly well developed and I rooted for Mina; I really wanted her to be a survivor. ( )