Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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The tension builds nicely with odd occurrences being explained away by the mundane so even no-nonsense Meg starts to wonder if she's just becoming obsessed with Uncle Paul. Three funny and vastly different sisters who sometimes irritated me but also humoured me in equal measures. It’s very well constructed, and the balance between tension and domestic dramas works surprisingly well. So, with the hapless Isabel struggling to calm Mildred down, Meg feels pressured into making the trip to the coast to sort everything out.Uncle Paul delivered on spine-chilling thrills but does not feel like a novel destined to live long in the memory. First, Mildred had to change into an entirely new outfit, including a different shade of nail varnish which took a quarter of an hour to dry. For she seemed to be looking once again into Uncle Paul’s queer dark eyes, so melancholy, and yet so alert.

Yes, this book is entertaining, there are some funny moments and it's clever, but still I ask myself - the point? Their motivations and views on the world seemed immature and more naive than I expect from women that of that age and experience, even in that era.

Throughout the narrative, you keep wondering if anything is indeed happening or if our characters are ‘just’ somehow paranoiac, imagining threat where there is none. On the surface, Uncle Paul could be the relatively innocent story of three sisters getting caught up in troublesome domestic matters during a seaside holiday. Fremlin’s a name new to me, but she seems to have a good grasp on vagaries of the human mind and certainly sounds well worth exploring.