Guilty pleasures. Those things we enjoy , such as a movie, television program, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.
For us literary lovers, a guilty pleasure usually involves a certain genre. What's mine? A fictional novel with an element of time travel. Imagine my delight, then, when I pick up this novel while in the bookstore and turned it over to read its summary.
Annie Aster is a unique lady living in a purple Victorian-style house in modern-day San Francisco. She enjoys dressing in styles popular to the 1800s. Growing up an orphan, her godmother made sure Annie was indulged in her eccentricities. So it's no surprise then when Annie finds a strange red door in an antiques shop that has some gold symbols all over it. Annie impulsively buys it and uses it as her back door from the kitchen to her rose garden at the back of the house. What she doesn't anticipate is the door being a portal that sends her back over 100 years as soon as she walks through it.
Elsbeth Gundy is a widow whose daughter has estranged herself from her family. She lives in the middle of wheat fields and does not converse with others often. She is outraged when she notices a guady, outlandish purple Victoria-style house in her back acreage. As she goes to knock on the back door of the house to give the owner a piece of her mind, Elsbeth finds herself back on her property with a sense of vertigo. Thwarted by something unknown, Elsbeth doesn't give up and decides to write a letter and leave it in the brass mailbox instead.
Over the course of quite a few letters, newspaper articles, and fateful meetings with strangers, Annie and Elsbeth are set on a course that is altering, has altered and will alter the lives of them and those they care about most. This is an engaging, fun, fantastical read that will bring a guilty pleasure to those who enjoy this particular brand of magic.
Oh, and in case you're wondering about the word "lemoncholy" here's a fact you may not know (I sure didn't) ... In an online dictionary of Victorian slang (I don't know which one, I'm paraphrasing info from the author to you), "lemoncholy" was used as a synonym for "melancholy" back in the day. The author, deciding to give it new meaning, combined the phrase "If life gives you lemons..." with the word "melancholy" to characterize the state in which someone makes the best of a bad situation.
Brilliant.