REBUILDING COVENTRY

by Sue Townsend ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1990

The author of the British best-seller The Adrian Mole Diaries (1986)--the journals of an almost unbearably precocious adolescent--now offers the extremely uneven adventures of an English housewife who murders a man and hides out with London's homeless population. Forty-ish Coventry Dakin is married to deadly dull Derek, a businessman whose pet tortoises ate his chief passion in life. Not even her two children or the art lessons she secretly takes can enliven things. All changes, however, when she sees her brutish next-door neighbor, Gerald Fox, strangling his wife. Coventry rushes over, hits Fox over the head with a children's plastic superhero--and races away. Fox dies, and the hunt is on. Coventry's face is plastered all over the lurid English tabloids (""Killer Housewife!"") as the police scour London for her. She goes to ground in Cardboard City, a ramshackle few acres of cardboard shanties that are home to the homeless, and there meets Dodo, a young bag-lady who is a member of a rich and politically prominent family. Their adventures include blackmailing Dodo's brother and going on a spree at the Ritz--before Finally skipping the country with fake passports. A sequel seems in the offing. Townsend is best when Waspishly satirizing English ""types"" like the staid Derek, but the plot here is thin and unbelievable, and the social-consciousness forced.

Pub Date: March 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION