FROZEN MUSIC

Swedish author Cobbold (The Purveyor of Enchantment, 1998, etc.) offers another winning discourse on relationships, once again distinguished by her piercing humor and incisive perspective on the usually skewed path of human interaction. The opening pages flip-flop between two children, a terminally sullen London girl and a dreamy Swedish boy connected only by the correspondence of their mothers. Perpetually astonished by the idiocy of adults, Esther dreams of looking into the minds of others, while Linus draws a more perfect world. He grows up to be a scatter-brained genius haunted by a desolate childhood; she remains the same cynical charmer, fangs in the bosom of her strange family. When the two meet some two hundred pages into their own story, Esther is a journalist fighting to save pensioners from the wheels of progress, Linus the architect whose opera house is to replace the old couple’s cottage. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, the two are primed for love: Linus is sad and alone after the break-up of his marriage, Esther convinced that romance is a pretty shady concept. Though things go well in their first encounter, the situation deteriorates as the pair’s individual codes of ethics do battle. But when Esther is sent to Linus’s summer house to nurse her vacationing mother’s broken hip, she falls madly (and we do mean madly) in love with him. Too bad her paper’s publicity has ruined his dream of the opera house. Too bad that the perfect Pernilla is always hanging about. Too bad that someone in the family is trying to poison Linus’s father. Esther, the novice in love, enacts a variety of amusing schemes to win her man’s heart, including ye olde message in a bottle, but not until they both return to England does the triad of all true romance—malice, passion, love—begin to bloom. A large cast and bizarre subplots (Linus’s oddball family, Esther’s breakdown in a London cafÇ) make for an engaging read, that, with any luck, should broaden Cobbold’s audience.