Rating: 5 stars
THE DUTCH HOUSE! THE DUTCH HOUSE! THE DUTCH HOUSE!
I’ll get the obvious out of the way now. No use waiting until the end…
I loved The Dutch House!
Like, really loved it. Perhaps you can tell from my overuse of capital letters and italics.
I’ve read only one other book by Ann Patchett – State of Wonder – but I have several others on my shelf like Bel Canto and The Magician’s Assistant. I knew she was able to tell a good story. You don’t win the kind of awards she’s won for nothing. Plus, her good friend is one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Gilbert, so that association was enough to solidify my trust in her storytelling abilities.
About one-fourth of the way through I came to the conclusion this wasn’t your average New York Times bestseller. You don’t come across The Grapes of Wrath or Beloved or Pride and Prejudice and think, what a good bestseller. You think this one is different…
Have you ever had a conversation with someone and found yourself admiring their confidence before they even finished the first sentence? Like the ions in the room altered to make room for them? Like their presence alone put you at ease because you didn’t need to worry about impressing them or making a fool out of yourself? His or her confidence was that large?
That’s Ann Patchett with The Dutch House:
Here are the characters.
Here is the premise.
Buckle your seatbelts.
It’s about to be a bumpy ride.
Immediately, we fall in love with Danny and Meave, a brother-sister duo to rival all others. We meet them as kids in a huge mansion known as The Dutch House. Through Patchett’s descriptions, we get a thorough investigation of this huge house – what it looks like, it’s history, how Danny, Meave, and their father Cyril Conroy came to live there. And, why, of all tragedies, did it cause their mother to run for the hills?
Andrea is another character. We meet her on page one with Danny and Meave. She is their new step-mother and she completely changes the trajectory of their lives.
We spend the rest of the book trying to piece it back together…
The way Patchett weaves in and out of current events, propelling you suddenly into the future without a moments notice, is so stunning it’s jarring. It had me saying, “OMG WHAT??” multiple times.
It’s one of my favorite aspects of the book.
She doesn’t dwell on every single detail. She glides over them on her way to more important information. Each time this adds more and more layers to the characters and the storyline. I felt like a fly on the wall, guilty for overhearing this family’s troubles and at the same time running after them on to the next page, and the next page because I couldn’t bear not knowing what happens next.
It was magical, the way she did it! I’ve never read anything like it before, or if I have, it wasn’t done nearly as well.
My favorite book of all time is The Signature of All Things. I’ve read it so many times I can recite it back to you chapter by chapter. I love it and it’s not a title I’m actively looking to hand over. So when I finished The Dutch House and immediately thought of The Signature of All Things I knew it was not your ordinary five-star book. I haven’t decided if I’m relinquishing the crown yet, but it’s definitely a contender. It was that good. As of right now, I’m calling it my favorite book of 2020.
I’ll be honest – it felt like so much more than a five- star book. It felt like a work of art.
I don’t know if you’ve experienced this before, but towards the end, I felt so attuned to the story, so in awe, so swept away by its beauty that it almost hurt.
Is that odd? It didn’t feel odd at the moment. It was like “this is so beautiful I can’t take it anymore but please God don’t ever let it stop!”
That’s what The Dutch House did for me.
I sincerely recommend you read it, and I hope you get a glimpse of the same things I did.
The Dutch House can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, or anywhere books are sold.
