Lorelei and Colin Bird are raising their four children - Meg, Beth, and twin boys Rory and Rhys - in a charming house in the Cotswalds.
Lorelei's favorite holiday is Easter Sunday, and the Bird house always hosts an Easter egg hunt for the neighborhood children.
When the youngsters eat their chocolate eggs, Lorelei collects the foil that covered them, because the colors are so pretty.
The Easter festivities are so important to Lorelei that she cajoles her children to participate even when they get too old for the fun. Thus, over the years, Lorelei has amassed a large collection of colored foil as well as a great many other things.
The fact is that Lorelei can't throw anything away. She's kept all the drawings her children ever made; dozens of worn out kitchen towels; old chipped bric-a brac; and much more. In addition, Lorelei can't resist buying things she doesn't need. Thus the Cotswold house gets more and more cluttered as the years pass, and the only family member bothered by this seems to be Meg.
There are stresses in the Bird home, but things rub along relatively smoothly until an Easter Sunday when Meg is 20, Beth is 18, and the twins Rory and Rhys are 14. Lorelei hosts her usual Easter egg hunt, there's a nice lunch, then a horrible tragedy upends the day. Easter Sunday will never be the same, and neither will the Bird family.
The book meanders back and forth over a 30-year period, from when Meg is 10, and happily hunting Easter eggs; until Meg is 40, and back home to bury her mother and clean out the house. By now the Bird house is so filled with newspapers, books, and Lorelei's treasures as to be almost completely inpenetrable, like the worst homes on the Hoarders television show.
We follow each of the major characters over the 30-year span of the story: Meg, who's the mature one, meets a man named Bill, has four children, and does well financially;
Attractive Beth becomes a personal assistant, lives with her mother until she's thirty, exhibits bad judgement, and suffers the consequences;
Rory runs off to a Spanish commune with an Irish girl, but has trouble accepting responsibility;
Lorelei separates from Colin, has another relationship, and when she's older, acquires an online boyfriend;
and Colin just mosies along until he has a later-life crisis.
Lorelei is the linchpin of the book and its sad to see one child after another pull away from her, largely because of her behavior, which - in addition to the hoarding - is quite selfish. For example, when Colin tries to plan a wonderful holiday for the family, Lorelei squashes the idea because she can't bear to leave her house.
Towards the end of the book we get an explanation for Lorelei's self-centered conduct, and see her regret for the estrangements she's caused, not only between herself and the children, but between the children themselves - who have little contact with one another. Unfortunately, Lorelei ends up lonely and sick and her death is very sad. But it's an opportunity for the family to come together, and perhaps mend some bonds.
I know hoarding is a mental illness, but Lorelei's explanation is almost logical. She says her 'treasures' form a sort of lattice that preserves important times and events in her mind. (Though one has to wonder how forty pot scrubbers, dozens of packages of hair scrunchies, and hundreds of moldy paperback books fit this explanation.)
The book presents a compelling picture of family dynamics, but (for me) the story moved too slowly; the jumping around in time was hard to follow; and some of Meg's emails to her online boyfriend were cringeworthy. Still, the book got many stellar reviews and readers interested in dysfunctional families might want to give a try.
Rating: 3 stars
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