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A Price For Everything: Rosamunde Pilcher's Bookshelf (Rosamunde Pilcher's Book Shelf)
by Mary Sheepshanks
Product Group: Book
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks (1998-01-15)
ISBN: 0312964781
EAN: 9780312964788
Dewy Decimal #: 823.914
Mass Market Paperback: 306 pages
SKU: 04296
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: First edition book, some pages dog-eared but otherwise in great condition
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
From the introduction by Rosamunde Pilcher:
"A Price for Everything is linked, from start to finish, by Mary Sheepshanks' humor and a rare sense of the ridiculous which bubble up at the least likely moments. I read the book at a single sitting and felt bereft when I finally closed the cover onto the last page."
"The house itself seemed to possess her. It was a love affair, and like many love affairs, it was inconvenient."
Nestled cozily in the English countryside stands a house called Duntan-grand, proud, beautiful to look at, yet slowly falling apart and riddled with problems. How can Sonia, Lady Duntan so fiercely love such a monster of a house, almost as much as she loves her four children, perhaps more than she loves her husband, whose family has lived at Duntan for over 200 years?
For Sonia, restoring Duntan to its former glory has become synonymous with repairing her own sense of self, and refurbishing the house means working closely with Simon Hadleigh, the charming director of the Heritage at Risk Association. But as her marriage seems to be crumbling faster than the house itself; her children growing up quickly; her painting career taking off and Simon awakening in her a long, dormant passion, Sonia realizes that everything has its price...
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Customer Reviews
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Stale Yorkshire pudding
Rating  (2)
Date: 2006-02-13
1 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
In this novel, an upper-crust Yorkshire mum of four tries to save her family estate, which is crumbling around her, and which the house-rich-and-cash-poor family can no longer afford to maintain. I bought the novel because it's part of the "Rosamunde Pilcher's Bookshelf" series. I felt it was big of Pilcher to recommend the book, because a) it isn't nearly as good as Pilcher's own similarly-themed women's fiction, and b) the villainess of the piece is named Rosamund.
I very much liked the author's depiction of the love that people can have for historic homes, which seem to become living beings or characters in their own right. The love that Sonia feels for her husband's ancestral home is far greater than the love she feels, in fact, for him: "The house itself seemed to possess her. It was a love affair, and like many love affairs, it was inconvenient." It's no wonder that Sonia resonates so deeply with the house; it's the only permanent feature in these people's lives, since they regard one another with a coldly calculating impermanence and a sense that, in the end, all human relationships can be discarded when they cease to be wholly pleasant or socially useful.
What's most striking about these characters is that they are often inexplicably detestable. He has an affair, so she has an affair; they weigh the merits of the female orgasm in kitchen conversations with their youngest children; their most serious problems seem to revolve around disagreeable longterm houseguests and a chain-smoking cook whom they hired sight unseen and can't bring themselves to fire, although she can't actually cook. Spoiled, self-involved, and constantly scheming: it's difficult to root for any of these characters, even Sonia.
I bought this novel because I was looking for a light, entertaining read, and because we just bought plane tickets to go to Yorkshire and southern Scotland in the spring, so I wanted an armchair-traveling read. Certainly, the book satisfies on the second front. Its Yorkshire location is depicted in fascinating detail, from the wilds of the countryside to the smallish jockeying of parish life. (Sheepshanks has a good wit and is wonderfully observant about the hypocrisy that passes for religion among most people, including her main characters and the tiresome vicar of their community.) But in the end, I was dissatisfied. It's tough to muster up much sympathy for the boredom of a gorgeous main character with four strapping children and a lavish lifestyle, even if money does happen to be a little tight.
Also, the novel had some mechanical problems that became quite distracting. The story is told from Sonia's POV, yet we are occasionally treated to the innermost thoughts of other characters, a rookie mistake that shouldn't happen in a St. Martin's book. Then, too, the book has a glaring number of errors and typos. I'm fairly forgiving of the kind that a good proofreader should catch ("sewing" seeds instead of sowing them, or stress having an "affect" instead of an "effect"). But there were also plenty of plain old spelling disasters that a simple spell-check program should have corrected. Very irritating-not the author's fault, but the publisher's.
In all, though, the most serious obstacle was that I found the novel's characters to be so tiresomely self-involved. Give me characters with what I would consider real problems, and a real love for each other despite their human flaws. Oh, and do pass the scones. --Jana Riess
A longer version of this review was posted on December 7, 2005 at The Review Revolution (janariess.typepad.com).
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Characters come to life in this book
Rating  (4)
Date: 2003-06-21
11 out of 13 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is my first experience of Sheepshanks but it won't be my last. Her beautifully written characters are the part of this book I liked best -- particularly the children and adolescents, who are notoriously difficult for writers to get right. Each of the children/adolescents were distinctive and believable individuals. The "heroine" is flawed but likeable, as is her husband and even the vastly annoying mother-in-law. The plot involves an upper class (but not particularly rich) British family living in a wonderful manor house that is falling down around them. There's no money to fix it up (it will take millions) and the husband (who inherited the house, which has been in his family for 200 years) wants to move to a smaller house nearby and sell the white elephant. His wife loves the house and is determined to find a way to continue living there. There are four children, a couple who no longer seem to love each other, a mother-in-law who is wealthy but brings trouble everywhere she goes, a supposed "monk" (brought by the mother-in-law) who is part of a secretive organization called the Brothers of Love, the husband's half-sister, a 16-year-old who gets into scrapes, and a couple of lovers. Unlike so many books, which could be improved by being edited to be shorter, this book could have been 50 pages longer and I think would have been better. Some scenes that would help the plot seem to have been left out (like people abruptly falling in love with too little description -- suddenly they're there without the reader quite understanding how they got to this point.) I also felt that the ending illness was contrived and detracted from the literary merit of this book. Nevertheless, this book has real literary merit but is also quite readable. I read it in a couple of days because I was enjoying it so much.
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Disappointing book
Rating  (3)
Date: 2002-01-28
2 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book had its amusing scenes, but it was too predictable. I read the excerpts here and Rosamunde Pilcher's comments about the book and bought it because of those. I'm glad I bought the paperback edition.
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English life and love
Rating (4)
Date: 2001-07-13
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
This was my first look at a book by Mary Sheepshanks. It was a great read-like a modern, humorous form of Jane Austen. The characters held my interest. It seems obvious that Sonia's devotion was more to the Dunstan manor than to her husband. Sonia , an artist and mother, seems quite selfish at times, not really trying to understand her husband, Archie, and he retaliates by having a brief affair. Neither of them seem to work very hard at repairing their marriage. Sonia's mother-in-law is obnoxious but fascinating. The author does an excellent job of describing the Dunstan children, who are lively and individual. I thought the ending was great, not really a surprise but satisfying.The author gives a tantalizing glimpse of life in an English manor house.
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A Delight
Rating (4)
Date: 2000-11-08
7 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
Dreamy Sonia was once a promising artist. She still paints, but in a vague sort of way. Her real life encompasses four children, a stale marriage to a dull but nice man, and an incomprehensible but fierce devotion to her husband's crumbling manor, Duntan. All of Sonia's passions and hopes revolve around saving the house, which needs extensive and costly repairs. She has, however, no firm plan to save it, and dreamily drifts through her days hoping for a miracle. She manages to do this despite an influx of the most hilarious and finely drawn characters: a part-time cook whose best efforts defy even the E. coli bug; a mother-in-law, Rosamunde, who is part grande dame, part hippy; Rosamunde's late-in-life teenaged daughter Martha, who is apt to go punk at the very worst times; and a shady erstwhile monk, who is described so well we can almost smell him. These creatures float in and out of Sonia's and Archie's life, as does Archie's buxom mistress, who is married to an irritating, French-spouting snob who is called "Jolie Roger" behind his back. Need I say more? This is a great read, charming, evocative, and well-written. It combines real insight with humor and charm.
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