Book Review: All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


When I first started this series over Christmas last year, I wanted to read nothing else in the months that followed. Gradually it dawned on me that although the books are well-written and the era beautiful realised, they are also really miserable. I felt quite depressed during all of Book 3! The fourth book had a few happier moments. All of those were quite thoroughly destroyed in this last volume, in which everyone is unhappy, everyone suffers, and there isn’t a single moment of relief. No one gets a break, no one has any hope. It has since occurred to me that perhaps this type of soapy saga is not my cup of tea. It also occurred to me that perhaps the author was pushed in this direction by her publishers who knew perfectly well that they’d make bigger bucks with bucketloads of misery. Many of the storylines were really quite tawdry as well, particularly amongst the younger folk. I thought the incestuous romance was beyond the pale and so out of keeping with the gentleness of these amazing novels. The device of using extremely short bursts of character narration was extremely annoying as well. I also found myself skipping large chunks of loathsome characters, such as Teddy, whose storyline delivered nothing to the whole picture and was just hurled in to make up for a lack of story. So all in all, I was quite relieved when I came to the end of this series. I wish it had ended on a happier note.



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