BOOK REVIEW
DETAILS
Publisher: Dundurn PressPrice: $21.99 paper
ISBN: 1-55002-606-2
Page count: 228 pp.
Size: 5 x 8
Released: May
The Restoration of Emily
by Kim Moritsugu
Kim Moritsugu’s The Restoration of Emily is a very funny, sometimes suspenseful novel for grown-ups. Women of a certain age with adolescent sons will find it particularly appealing. So will those who have had the delightful experience of being attracted to a younger man and having that attraction returned.
Emily Harada is a young 50, an architect specializing in restoring vintage Toronto houses. She has a 14-year-old son, Jesse, who’s mad about basketball and plagued by celiac disease, which means that he can’t consume anything with gluten, from wheat bread to beer. Emily also has an ex-husband in New York, disagreeable colleagues and clients, and a mountain of authority issues that she has yet to resolve.
To put the elements of the story down like that makes it sound as if it were written to order for a particular audience that just happens to form a huge segment of the book-buying public. But Moritsugu writes with dash and irony. Her dialogue sounds right, and her nasty comments about the fools whom Emily does not suffer lightly are right on the mark. She also carefully but nearly invisibly sets out the signposts of her story, so that each surprise, the reader realizes after the initial shock, is really only the consequence of something set in motion earlier. Obviously the skill she exhibited in her last novel, The Glenwood Treasure, has come in handy here.
The story ends with Emily finally overcoming problems that have plagued her for years – the difficulties of working with others, the struggle to maintain integrity, the need for a woman to make her own life. Jesse, too, is on his way to becoming a competent person. That sounds a bit simplistic, but just as Emily is an expert at finding the soul of an old house in her restorations, Moritsugu is a pro when it comes to telling a story in a fresh and engaging way. I stayed up late to finish it, in fact, even though I was pretty sure it would end the way it did.
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