The Slaves of Solitude

Oh boy. I remembered loving this book when I first read it a decade ago, but it was even more delicious than I recalled. The action, such as it is, takes place in the miserable confines of the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a drab suburban rooming house outside London during the Second World War where the horrible bully Mr. Thwaites dominates the conversation, the meek Miss Roach cringes at his every word, and the "cute" Vicki Kugelmann arrives to throw the household upside-down. I choose my word carefully when I say this is a comic masterpiece, a companion, in an odd way, to our in-house favorite, The Women in Black: another Christmastime tale, and although it wallows in the worst of petty human nature while The Women in Black (mostly) seeks the light, there is a similar sense that, just once in a while, the meek might really inherit the earth. Or at least a cozy little bit of it.