The cove is settled in the galèrest of all the galères (my sister and I call galères -the french for galley- the nowhere lands of the world.), and this is a case of get out of the cove before the cove gets you. It's the ass of the world, where Christ lost his hat, the fifth pine, except there are no pines, but chestnuts, and these all have the plague and are fated to die shortly.It is the story of a woman, Laurel, who has drawn the short straw in life; for her "omnes vulnerant, ultima necat" (all of them hurt, and the last one kills); and she has been on the receiving end of fate’s blows for so long that I thought maybe she could survive a bullet in the chest, as if being used to the invisible ones would make her immune to one of real metal. But metaphorical mithridatism only goes so far, I'm afraid.
The beauty of it resides in her single shot at happiness. She grabs her moment hungrily, between awkward daydreaming and musing about birds.
The character that comes to life with more poignant realism is the everyday villain, Chauncey Feith, so small minded and negligible that it's hard to grasp that he isn't in fact harmless. They say “don’t blame evil when you can blame stupidity”, and in Chauncey you can blame both.
Hank, Laurel’s brother, singlehandely (ha.) makes this feel like an old-fashioned romance, one of those medieval ballads in which brother and sister would end up in twin graves. He died because he was a man who would kill his sister’s killer. Wahouu!
Rest in peace, you semi literate corsican-style tragic siblings. I really enjoyed the time we spent together.