Reviewed by Ian

A young woman shares a house with an old woman who is, of course, obsessed with her multiple medical problems. The 'casa' belongs to the old woman. The young woman thinks she will inherit it, and that it was 'stolen' from her own mother in some way. Therese, the young woman, is going overseas to get married. The story is told from the point of view of Robert, a close friend of Therese whose romantic love for her is unreciprocated. The story is set on a typical sort of evening in their lives James, I can express my response to the characterisation in an anecdote. I wrote a couple of very short stories for my own father a few months ago. They had to be fairly short because he has Alzheimer�s Disease and his concentration span and short term memory retention are poor. I sent them to him and after he had read them, asked him what he thought. He said he thought they were written well, but why did I want to bother writing about people who weren't interesting enough ro deserve to be written about? I realise that Alzheimer's sufferers are a bit inward-looking, but in it's own way, this story suffers the same problem. It is clearly written from a young person's point of view (quite rightly too), but the characters are unsympathetic (in both senses). It would give the reader more involvement, I think, if one of the characters was written as more insightful, having some empathy, or even sympathy. I found it hard to care very much about what became of any of the characters, and that makes the story hard to get into. Also, James, about Zola. It is nice to use such devices to help set a mood, but it doesn't set the mood if no-one in your likely target audience reads Zola, and I'm not sure that this Therese is anything like Zola's Therese, so what does it add?