(no subject)

You know that feeling when you predict something is going to happen in a book that's going to annoy you, and then you spend the rest of the book knowing that you will ultimately be unsatisfied, because either the thing is going to happen and you'll be annoyed or the thing won't happen and you'll be annoyed at having been wrong?

Anyway, Natasha Solomons' The House at Tyneford is a book about a teenage Austrian-Jewish refugee who gets a position as a maid in a British house during WWII while she's waiting for her famous opera singer mother and famous author father to make it to America and get her a visa.

THE BACK COVER: And there she will strike up a connection with the son of the master of the house!
ME: Ah yes, I suppose there will be a romance.
THE BOOK: And the first person she encounters at Tyneford is the master of the house, in a middle-of-the-night meet-cute!
ME: Hmmmmm.
THE BOOK: Oh and here's the son, they're flirting, it's sweet.
ME: OK fine!
THE BOOK: Now they're engaged!
ME: OK great!
THE BOOK: His dad seems upset about it.
ME: Oh, not unexpected.
THE BOOK: But, like, not necessarily for the normal reasons a British dad with a big house would be upset about his son getting engaged to the Jewish parlor maid, and also he sold a priceless painting to try to get her parents out of Austria
ME: ... oh no.
THE BOOK: Now she's been arrested as an enemy alien and the dad comes and rescues her and carries her home in his arms!
ME: OH NO.
THE BOOK: Oh here's the son back again from the army! Look, he's on leave and they're perfectly cute! Though he's going to have to go back to the front lines soon, of course!
ME:


( The actual spoilers )