China Court

It has all the ingredients for my ideal comfort read: a family tree, a house with a name, and a story that spans at least a century. As one plotline unfolds over two weeks in 1960, tales of earlier generations of Quins are interleaved in a particular, if not exactly chronological, way. (The family tree comes in handy.) I was gobbling up the rich historical detail of manners, fashion, decor, etc., and flipping pages to discover the circumstances of doomed romances and twisted hopes, absolutely confident that there would be—not just a happy ending—an euphoric one! But the final chapter was distinctly UNcomfortable—a curveball that I couldn’t integrate with my expectations except by reading it in a cynical and prurient way. Then I read the introduction (I never read them first) and began to reconsider. Godden is too talented to have written unintentionally, and she understands storytelling’s power to enchant. I concluded that she was breaking her own spell to remind readers of the painful truth she had been hinting at all along. And that the only thing better than a comfort read is one that—in the end—makes you think.