(Bloomsbury, $38.99)
If Barbara Trapido wrote a book of phone numbers and plant names, I would still buy it and no doubt love it. In my eyes, the woman can do no wrong. I feel like I have been reading her forever and indeed it was with some shock I discovered that her first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, came out in 1982.
I can’t quite figure that out as I’m sure I wasn’t even born in 1982. I guess I must have been a very early reader. Anyway, this is only her seventh novel in that 30-year span so it’s a long time between drinks and fans will devour Sex & Stravinsky like a hot buttered scone because it’s more of what we have been craving.
Short creative type Josh is a South African transplanted to London where he meets and marries tall, practical, beautiful Caroline – a brainy Australian following her dream of going to oxford.
Caroline can cook, clean, run up a ball gown and teach herself Farsi – the only thing that stops her from being perfect is her hideous mother whose sole purpose in life seems to be sucking the wind out of Caroline’s sails. Josh and Caroline are both kind, decent, loving, clever people in need of a good slap, if you ask me, and because I trust Barbara Trapido after all these years, I knew she was going to give them one.
They’ve both politely abandoned their dreams after all and now there is their ballet-mad daughter, Zoe, to consider. Life and lives intersect when past, present and future collide in a family reunion of sorts in South Africa. No-one, it’s safe to say, will be quite the same again.
Barbara Trapido often does her writing in the middle of the night because everything is dark and quiet, and the real world has yet to stir. She prefers it that way, she says, because she’s closer to her dreams than reality. Sex & Stravinsky is a delightful combination of the two.
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