The Palace of Strange Girls

The Singleton family is trying to push their worries aside and enjoy their vacation at the Belvedere Hotel in Blackpool, England in 1959. Ruth can be an overbearing mother, a distant wife, and money hungry as she has her eye on pushing her husband to earn more in order to afford the luxuries she wants in life. Helen is 16 and hates how controlling her mother Ruth is. She wants to be able to wear the latest fashion, to go out on dates, and to be able to leave school and work at a dress shop full time. Beth is 7 and dealing with the horrible memories of her heart surgery. She is quiet and almost withdrawn because her mother doesn’t allow her to play or get cold or have any fun for fear she will get sick and need another surgery. Meanwhile their father Jack is unsure about his life and choices he will need to make. If he takes a promotion at work that will mean more stress and having to lay off employees; but if he doesn’t take it that means fighting with his wife Ruth. On top of that he receive a letter from someone in his past that has him longing to go back in time and make different choices.

The story is incredibly and painstakingly slow. The contents of Jack’s letter and the details of Beth’s illness are kept like they are some big mystery but once you are let in all it does is further character development. Why you are left in the dark for so long is beyond me. What you are given is some situations of a family that is on the verge of breaking trying to portray the perfect family on vacation, a lot of information about Ruth, her household duties, her beliefs, and her greed, and more information than I ever wanted about weaving and creating fabric.

I found nothing likeable about the detached, greedy, self absorbed Ruth. It was Jack, Helen, and Beth that were the interesting characters. But it took at least half of the book before I began to feel that way. Then I often found myself skimming here or there when it once again drifted into the workings of weaving or Ruth going on and on in her head about how wonderful a mother & wife she thinks she is.

Each character goes through a growth phase of some sort during the vacation period. They either learn something new about themselves, change something about themselves, or realize something new about a family member only to maintain their personal way of living. There aren’t necessarily any lessons or morals to be found but not every story needs that. Since it also seems that Ruth is the one that could have stood to learn the most and didn’t does make this story more believable. The problem with that is reading a slow moving, boring, realistic story that has nothing in ways of action, mystery, or intrigue and then you end it with a character that you don’t care for pretty much getting what she wanted by being such a greedy person what do you really gain from it? I read to escape, to learn, to be entertained, or be scared but instead what I got was a somewhat average family fumbling around in their ways for 344 pages. That’s something I can see on a daily basis and also try to keep from happening in my life instead of spending the time it takes to read this book.