Ne Obliviscaris: Do Not Forget by Margaret Henderson Smith
| Ne Obliviscaris: Do Not Forget by Margaret Henderson Smith | |
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| Category: Women's Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: The sequel to A Question of Answers follows Harriet as she is pulled between two men - only accident-prone Hat is usually the one causing the damage. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 262 | Date: November 2009 |
| Publisher: Arima | |
| ISBN: 978-1845494063 | |
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Poor Harriet Glover. She's caught between her attraction to two men. There's Mark (coincidentally he's a Glover too), her long-term partner and father of her two children. The girls are grown up now but he still hasn't made up his mind about whether or not he and Hat should get married - and truth to tell Hat isn't that certain either. In theory it sounds like a good idea and would regularise matters but she's utterly smitten by Joris Sanderson, the headmaster of the school where she's a teacher. There are times when she thinks that, joy of joys, he's attracted to her, but then there are so many other women in his life that she's far from certain whether he's going to seduce her or sack her.
We first met Harriet, Mark and Joris in A Question of Answers and if there's one thing that we learned it's that she must be related to Frank Spencer of Some Mothers do 'Have 'em. She's trouble, but not in a malicious way. It's just that accidents seem to wait around for her to arrive so that they can happen. Nothing is safe when she's about. But it does seem as though it's decision time for Mark and Harriet – he's returned from a long trip to Antarctica and seems convinced that they should get married.
It's essentially the same cast of characters that we met in A Question of Answers but if you haven't read that book you might struggle to understand who some of them are and quite what part they play in the story. Margaret doesn't do much in the way of recapping, so I'm afraid that you're going to have to buy the first book or work a bit harder.
The story plays as pure farce and it's heavily reliant on coincidence and the sort of slapstick humour which you find in Wodehouse. The plot's perhaps a little more complex and unpredictable (I really wasn't expecting the way that Ne Obliviscaris worked out) but the characters have the same two-dimensional feel. Some of them have moved on annoyingly little since the first book and I reached a point where I would cheerfully have strangled Tricia, who seemed far too shallow to be Hat's friend.
I enjoyed the story, particularly when we got towards what turned out to be a nail-biting finish and I'd like to thank the author for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
You could read this book as a stand alone, but you'd really get a lot more out of it if you'd read A Question of Answers first.
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You can read more about Margaret Henderson Smith here.
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