The title page gave the publishing date as 2012, so what was going on?
It took a while before I twigged: in November I reviewed Christmas Magic, a collection of Kelly's short stories, with Mara and her man troubles figuring in one of them. Now Mara's love life - identical to the short story to start with - forms one of three strands in The House on Willow Street, the others being Tess Power and her sister, Suki.
Much of the plot is depressingly familiar. Tess yearns for the man she turned down in her teens and he - now rich, of course - returns to the Irish village where Tess still lives, buys the Powers' decrepit mansion and starts renovating it.
The fashionable sub-genre of romantic fiction, where woman reunites with old flame, seems to me somewhat bizarre. People and circumstances change and, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, in his 1940 novel, "You can't go home again". Move on, please, romance writers. And if I never read another novel that starts with a prologue, I will be very happy.
- Gillian Vine is a Dunedin writer.
