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Cargando... My Cleaner (2005)por Maggie Gee
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. An enjoyable if light comedy of manners exploring the similarities and contrasts between white professional suburban mother and black, educated African mother when brought together in a domestic setting. October 2020. ( ) "She and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same" By sally tarbox on 2 January 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Maybe 2.5* for a readable, if really rather silly, bit of chick-lit. Vanessa is a lecturer in Creative Writing and rather a sloane ranger type, with her materialistic, fashionable London life. But her 22 year old son Justin is lying in bed with some sort of breakdown, and Vanessa invites her old cleaner, who helped bring him up, back to the home from Uganda, to help. And so the stage is set for an implausible tale. Inevitable tensions between Vanessa - unpleasant, stingy, jealous - and Mary - forced to occupy a subordinate role, but very much her own person. The glimpses of Mary's life in Uganda were quite interesting, but I just didn't buy the interplay of the two women. My Cleaner studies the relationship between two women with much more in common than either of them suspects. Vanessa is a sixtyish English woman, solidly middle class, a writer with two novels and several successful Pilates books to her credit who now teaches creative writing, the divorced mother of a son. Mary is a younger Ugandan woman, college educated, linen supervisor in a hotel in Kampala, also the divorced mother of a son, who once worked for several years as Vanessa's cleaner. When Vanessa's son Justin has a nervous breakdown, she appeals to Mary to return to England to help him. Mary realizes that she can save most of the money she makes in England and use it for a better life with her boyfriend and for the girls in her village. The two women do not like each other. Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationship with Justin, but Mary mothered Justin when he was a baby and Vanessa was too busy. In fact, Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationships with everybody and spends a good bit of her time shoring up her own shaky ego. Mary, on the other hand, lost her son to her husband when they divorced, and although she was devoted to him, she was not able to spend a lot of time with him when he was a baby because she was taking care of Justin. Now Jamil (or Jamey or Jamie - Does Mary not know how he spells his name?) has disappeared, and Mary is as fearful for him as Vanessa is for Justin. Mary sees Vanessa as out of touch with reality, a small woman swamped by her possessions, spoiled, and too self-indulgent to be of any use in the world. What ensues is a charming, funny, touching journey to self-understanding and accommodation through misunderstandings and deception. Maggie Gee's writing is pitch-perfect, understated, and insightful. As Mary and Vanessa haggle over money, she writes, "They are a breath apart, with the world between them." I thought before I wrote this that I liked the book very much. Now I believe I love it. An unexpected and a delightful read for me; This was my first experience reading this author and I want to read more .... This is clever ... It explores many areas including, cultural differences, racism, family-life, tolerance .... It is touching ... yet, lively and you just want to keep on reading it. I could not put it down!!
Much of the joy of reading Maggie Gee derives from her ability to take control of a complex and multilayered narrative and render it as accessible and satisfying as a television soap. Her prose is rich and gossipy; it mixes the highbrow with the vernacular, and is, at times, shockingly cynical. Her characters can be cynical, too, and as the book progresses, the situation they find themselves in appears to be beyond redemption. In a recent interview, she said she likes to give 'not so much resolution as a little way out of the woods'. My Cleaner is a moving, funny, engrossing book that provides just that: a triumph of hope over despair. Pertenece a las seriesMary and Vanessa (1)
"My Cleaner is a moving, funny, engrossing book."--The Observer "Elegant, humorous and surprising, this is a classy performance."--The Times "Beautifully observed, intelligent and moving."--The Scotsman Ugandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin--now twenty-two, handsome, and gifted--is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build toward a startling climax on a snowbound motorway. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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