This is a tragic family drama, mostly about a brother and sister who are abandoned by their mother and then suffer at the hands of the wickedest of step-mothers.  The story is very slow moving, and somehow seemed longer than its actual 350 odd pages.  But the characters are all extremely well written and the Dutch House itself has an imposing character all of its own. It is a very moving story at times and although there are a few mundane details that I wasn't a huge fan of, overall I did enjoy reading this book. 

I have read in several reviews that some readers really dislike the cover of this book.  I have to say that I LOVE the cover and it is so apt for the book.  So often a cover has no relevance to the story whatsoever but this one could not be more fitting.

This is the first book I have read by Ann Patchett and I am not sure that her writing style suits me. I found the book an awkward read, mainly because of the way the relationships were described and portrayed. There was a lot going on and the book needs reading properly, no skimming allowed. I just felt uncomfortable about the whole thing.

There have been some comments in other reviews about the cover and, whilst I agree that it is an ugly cover, I do think it will stand out in bookstore displays and as such could be a good marketing decision.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the chance to read and review a free e-ARC.

Ann Patchett's latest beautiful publication (expected September 2019), follows the lives of Danny and Maeve (brother and sister) living in the USA. We meet them as they are growing up in The Dutch House - and Danny's narration follows their lives as they grow, move, and embark on their own adventures throughout their lives.

It is rare that an object becomes such a pivotal character of a novel - but Ann Patchett has achieved this quite well in her portrayal of The Dutch House throughout this book. The Dutch House becomes a character in itself - an important part of the story and of the history of Danny and Maeve's lives.

The narration is patchy - it's a puzzle that is gradually put together as the book progresses. We are given snippets of the future as we are being taught about the past and vice versa. In many other books this style has frustrated me - but it felt just right for The Dutch House - that we should be given glimpses of the significant past and the impactive future.

Ann Patchett is a story teller - there's no doubt that her words are consistently beautiful enough to pay equal attention to characters, scenery and places. The Dutch House is the book to read this Autumn - for family saga, history, drama and beautiful architecture.

Thank you to netgalley.co.uk for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I am so glad I got the opportunity to read this book, I could not get enough of this story! I thought this was a well-written book with an interesting storyline. I thought the characters were well fleshed out and I wanted to know all about them, I thought Danny was a great narrator who got me hooked into the novel quickly. I felt like the author was making the house in which the novel in its own character, I haven't read a book like that in a while. I look forward to reading more books by Ann Patchett.

When we first meet Danny and his elder sister, Maeve Conroy, they're both living at The Dutch House with their parents and under the gaze of the portraits of the former owners whose oil paintings still hang on the walls. It's a strange family dynamic: Cyril Conroy is distant and the closest Danny seems to come to him is when he goes out with him on a Saturday collecting rents from properties the family owns. Elna Conroy is loving, but absent increasingly often until the point comes when the children are told that she will not be returning. In other circumstances this might have affected Maeve and Danny deeply, but their primary relationship is with each other. It's a bond which only death will break.

Then Cyril Conroy brings Andrea to the Dutch House and another dysfunctional relationship is brought into the family. There doesn't seem to be any great affection there and Maeve and Danny speculate that their father eventually married Andrea because he didn't know how to get her to leave the house, Andrea brought two children with her and we see her less-than-subtle manoeuvring to ensure that Norma and Bright take precedence - and Maeve's retaliations to make certain that Danny gets the lion's share of the educational funds available. The result of this is that Danny qualifies as a doctor despite the fact that his heart is in residential development. Maeve sums up the relationship between the siblings and their father when they have an almost-illicit meal on their own with him as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.

Andrea's defining move was to force Maeve and Danny to leave the Dutch House. In the decades which followed they would revisit the property regularly, but only to sit outside in Maeve's car, speculating what was going on inside and remembering the times they had spent there. Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was? Danny asked his sister and we never can as we revisit our memories through the lense of what we know now. Of course, the main point of which they both know so little is what happened to their mother: her absence has been a more powerful influence on their lives than any presence they have known.

I'm always nervous of books which are surrounded with as much hype as The Dutch House has attracted, but on this occasion it is totally justified. It's been called 'the book of the autumn' but I'd go further and say that for me it's the book of the year. No one conveys aging in quite the way that Ann Patchett has mastered. We follow Danny and Maeve through more than four decades without ever experiencing a disconcerting jump as the years pass. You might occasionally suspect that Maeve is a little domineering, that Danny can be just a bit malleable, but the story is hypnotic and compelling. Reading the book was pure joy and it was hard not to turn back to the beginning and start again when I got to the last page.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

The Dutch House is a rich tapestry of human lives exploring complex familial relationships. Growing up in the privileged but emotionally cold environment, of the Dutch House mansion, largely ignored by their business oriented father, elder sister Maeve takes on the responsibility and nurturing of her much younger brother, Danny, to the detriment of her own personal circumstances. Rounded central characters highlight the heartbreaking decisions thrust upon the 15 year old Danny following the death of his father. A fabulous read!

Nobody does epic family sagas like Ann Patchett, and The Dutch House is true to form. Moving back and forth through time lines, it tells the story of the Conroy family and their lives in the Dutch House, a stunningly designed house where they have lived since the father bought it as a surprise for his wife. Told from the point of view of their son Danny, the story follows Danny and his sister Maeve throughout their lives, as their family is torn apart and their world changed forever, with everything revolving around and rooted in the house.

Although there were a couple of characters I found hard to understand (particularly their mother, whose motivations aren’t fully explored or explained), this is a beautifully constructed and perfectly paced novel about the relationship between two siblings and the idea of home.

Very much a character-lead novel, but where one of the main ‘characters’ is disconcertingly the Dutch House of the title I have to admit to being somewhat taken aback. I call it a character because not only is it the location for most of narrative of the novel, but it directs most of the action too. It is the human characters’ responses to the house that motivate and direct their life choices. Family dynamics and disfunctional relationships are at the heart of the story but the close bond between brother and sister help them to navigate the various challenges life throws at them. An interesting read.

While the lives of the family in this epic novel keep altering, the Dutch House remains unchangeable with its ornate fixtures and carvings, built of so much glass that someone standing outside it can see right through it.

Siblings Danny and Maeve keep driving back to their childhood home, sitting in a car on the kerb to talk about the past which unfolds through Danny’s eyes. When Danny and Maeve’s mother abandons her children and they end up being brought up by their father, the ice-cold Andrea enters their lives. And while she appears to show the siblings no love whatsoever, domestic helpers Jocelyn and Sandy step into the breach.

Patchett's writing is without fanfare, so that style never gets in the way of this transfixing tale. There is love; there are family feuds; there are sacrifices. The plot isn’t in a rush to get anywhere and towards the end I found myself wanting a little more pace. Having said that, what a welcome experience it was to read a novel that is simply good old-fashioned storytelling at its best.

If you want strong characters and a read you can linger over - instead of frenetically rushing through - this one’s for you. What a fine writer Patchett is.

In post-war Philadelphia, Danny and Maeve Conway grow up in the 'Dutch House', a beautiful building that is 'open inside', with huge windows allowing passers-by to look directly through the house and to the views beyond. As adults, they can no longer return to their childhood kingdom, but neither of them can leave it behind; they start sitting outside the house in a car for hours on end every now and again, although they never catch a glimpse of the house's present inhabitants. There's something fairy-tale in this exile that sits at the heart of Ann Patchett's latest novel, The Dutch House; it reminded me of Lucy Clifford's horrific cautionary tale, 'The New Mother', in which two children are told that if they do not behave their real mother will go away and be replaced by another mother 'with glass eyes and a wooden tail'. (Spoiler: they don't behave, and the story ends with them watching their once-happy home from the outside as the new mother walks within.)

Danny narrates the story of the Dutch House, but Maeve is at its centre; after their mother ran away to India when Danny was very small, she's taken care of her brother. There's a sense that Maeve threw herself in the path of this explosion to shield Danny from the worst of its effects; for most of his childhood, despite having no mother and a distant father, Danny feels secure. Maeve's sacrifice continues into adulthood ( we find out much of what happens to the siblings in later life early on, as Patchett cleverly constructs the novel around a series of flash-forwards) as Danny pursues his education while she takes up a make-ends-meet job at an accountancy firm.

As ever, Patchett balances the emotional crises of her novel perfectly, and while much of The Dutch House is (deliberately) predictable, its power to move doesn't lie in surprising the reader but in seeing how everything plays out. Nevertheless, as with Patchett's last novel, Commonwealth, I was left feeling slightly underwhelmed - if only because I know how brilliant she can be. I think Patchett's writing works best for me when she takes on more unusual subject-matter, as she did in State of Wonder, whereas both her last two novels have felt more familiar, telling long family stories in the vein of Anne Tyler, whom I don't especially rate. There's no doubt that The Dutch House is a good novel, but I wonder how long it will stay with me.

I will cross-post this review to my blog and Goodreads nearer the publication date.

Disappointing. Maeve and Danny's mother has run away, their father dies, but leaves everything this second wife. Having read almost 40 percent of the book I gave up as it didn't seem to be going anywhere just brother and sister reminiscing. I may not have done the book justice and am sure others may really enjoy it.

This is one of these sprawling dynastic narratives which American writers are fond of. It's almost a family saga! The narrator is Danny who has a sister Maeve and a mother who left their father when Danny was three and his sister was ten and disappeared to India. The book is about the children’s lives and about how they then respond to having a wicked stepmother and two stepsisters and how they cope with being disinherited after their father's death. The whole story is set against a grand house which used to belong to a wealthy Dutch family, the VanHoebeeks. Part of the reason why the children's mother leaves is that she doesn't feel that she fits into this grand house and, at one stage, you begin to think the house might be cursed but it's really more of a linking thread in a story about how families can be changed over the years by wealth, poverty and death. Its history, often referred to, raises another issue since the VanHoebeeks have a rags to riches to rags story but does that really say much about them and how they felt?

And then, how do we uncover the past if we see things differently when we look back? That’s more problematic here because Danny is only seven at the beginning of the story so is not necessarily a reliable narrator. It is also a key theme in the novel because later, after a convenient course in psychology, Danny describes how we 'overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we see it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered'.

Apart from this insight, another thing that happens to Danny is that, unwittingly, he gradually comes to resemble his father, slightly aloof and not at home with his emotions. It's a rather clumsy device but at the end his wife divorces him pointing out that she's never liked the family home which he imagined as a gift to her. Maybe the message is that we can't escape who we are or truly know who we were.

At the end of the novel, things get tidied up and, to be honest, parts of it require a bit of a stretch of the imagination to get to the kind of satisfactory ending which Ann Patchett wants. I didn't find this bit either truly satisfactory or convincing and I suppose the idea is that Danny comes to have a better understanding of himself and where he came from. I had another problem with Danny. There seem to be bits of his life which are glossed over so that suddenly he is a qualified physician or building a small real estate empire. His relationships with his wife and children are also sketchy as if he sort of fell into them without really noticing on the way to a sort of resolution if not a happy ending. It would be hard to identify the critical points, the landmarks, which have brought him to this place.

On the positive side, Danny's sister Maeve is a well drawn character often holding the plot together and acting as a surrogate for her disappeared mother. If you like these sprawling novels that reach across generations this might be for you. Maybe American literature is more influenced by Dickens than our own but, in the end, I found it hard to care about what happened to the characters and was not entirely convinced by the outcome.

This is one of the best books I have read in ages. The characters are well drawn, as children and adults. I also felt their was a great sense of period. A mother who behaves like that of the main characters is hard to sypathise with, but her motivations and hangups were clear.

If you enjoy family stories with depth and insight then do read this.

Wow, what a strong emotive story of love, family and home. When an author creates substance and a character for a place with as much effort as they do for the people in the story it makes for a wonderful tale.

This is a story of siblings, Maeve and Danny, and their strong connection with the family home they lived in as children. The story, narrated by Danny, is a non-linear jumping timeline of craziness - this adds to the wonder of it! You slowly build the jigsaw of the story and it gets clearer.

The characters and flow of the book will draw you into their rich tapestry. The lives, loves and betrayals are centred around the beautiful Dutch house. Very enjoyable.
ARC copy.

An absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable family saga spanning five decades, beginning when Cyril Conroy’s business success allows him to purchase the mansion-like Dutch House in a wealthy neighbourhood just outside Philadelphia. However, instead of the idyllic family life he envisages, the purchase sets off a train of events that spirals out of control. Narrated by his son Danny, it’s a dark and painful tale of family, inheritance, loss and love, as the house itself casts a long shadow down the years. I was glad I didn’t know anything about the book’s trajectory before I started, and I would recommend NOT reading any reviews before reading it, as many of them, in my opinion give too much of the plot away. Let the novel unfold in its slow and inexorable way and at its own pace, and let what happens continually surprise you. A great read from a great author.

This is a most compelling read which tracks - and backtracks - the lives of people who have lived in the eponymous house. The characters - including that of the house itself - are vividly portrayed by the narrator. However, as I read I became more and more impatient with what I was seeing as the conscious emotional detachment of the narrator, which detracted from my enjoyment of this well-written novel.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a copy of the book in exchange for this honest review.

The Dutch House is wonderful. Its a story about Family and Love and Home. Centred around Danny, Maeve and their wild obsession with a house that used to be theirs (The Dutch House, of course), the story is told from Danny’s perspective, in no certain order of events. Theirs is a story of grief, right from the outset, abandoned by their mother, ignored by their father, exiled by their recently widowed step-mother, Danny and Maeve have no choice but to look after each other, it’s in their blood. But no matter how far they seem to stray, they always come back to The Dutch House, it calls to them. Patchett has done it again, she has such a talent for invoking feelings in you. The writing is stellar, the story is wonderful and it’s hard to believe that at the end of it all I have a soft spot for the house. A must read.

An extremely well written book about a very dysfunctional family. The characters were well structured and their actions believable with the exception of their mother. It was not really explained why she abandoned her family as she did. She seemed mostly like a wandering lost soul. A story of subdued anger and resentment that seemed to come full circle through the generations.

The Dutch House is a generational novel about unfairness and resentment. Maeve and Danny initially grow up without their mother, who leaves them with their father at an early age to pursue charitable works. Then a stepmother and her two children move in like cuckoos to replace them and they are sidelined.
The characters are believable and well-drawn. The situation is relatable and like reality, nothing is clear cut - there are faults and failings on all sides and the reader's sympathies are fluid as the narrative plays out.
The grand Dutch House itself is an architectural oddity and despite being coveted, a property brings wealth but not happiness - it is only when the house is full of friends partying and enjoying themselves that the place becomes a home.