Moggach, Deborah "The Carer"

Moggach, Deborah "The Carer" - 2019

I have read "Tulip Fever" by the same author and thought it was very good. So, when a friend offered to lend me this one, I took the opportunity.

This was not the same at all. Not just because it was a different topic. It just read more like chick-lit disguised as a serious novel.

While this could be a great novel about old age and how the care of a senile father can take up everyone's resources, the story turned more and more into a soap opera with family secrets everywhere. I could have done without all that and it might have been a brilliant novel. This is just very unreal. The only thing missing is a murder and the landing of an alien ship, then all genres would have been covered.

According to Goodreads, the novel is humourous. I couldn't detect that.

From the back cover:

"From the bestselling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Tulip Fever, a deliciously funny, poignant and wry novel, full of surprising twists and turns.

James is getting on a bit and needs full-time help. So Phoebe and Robert, his middle-aged offspring, employ Mandy, who seems willing to take him off their hands. But as James regales his family with tales of Mandy's virtues, their shopping trips, and the shared pleasure of their journeys to garden centres, Phoebe and Robert sense something is amiss. Is this really their father, the distant figure who never once turned up for a sports day, now happily chortling over cuckoo clocks and television soaps?

Then something happens that throws everything into new relief, and Phoebe and Robert discover that life most definitely does not stop for the elderly. It just moves onto a very different plane - changing all the stories they thought they knew so well."