The Widow Waltz

by Sally Koslow

[Leah]

When I was offered the chance to read Sally Kowlow’s newest novel The Widow Waltz, I though it sounded like such an interesting read! It comes with plenty of reviews to back it up – three whole pages at the front of the novel and I expected a somewhat light-hearted look at death and widow-hood, and ending up penniless when you least expect it. But I must confess to being disappointed. I’m the kind of reader who just wants a straightforward story. I don’t think authors need to be particularly clever in their writing, and I just felt like Koslow was trying a bit too hard with the novel.

I normally very much enjoy novels where the main character finds herself in a hole thanks to her husband’s death. Or, not just her husband’s death, to be fair. I like how it makes characters have to stand on their own two feet, and perhaps do things they don’t expect, and I was curious to see how Georgia Waltz and her two daughter Nicola and Luey would fare when faced with being poor. It’s rather a sad tale – poor, little rich people who can no longer afford drivers or cleaners or their big fancy house and second home in the Hamptons. It’s very much a tale of people who don’t live in the real world – Georgia hasn’t had a job since she adopted Nicola, Nicola flits from place to place, living off her inheritance, and Luey is a college drop-out. You don’t really sympathise with them; sure, Ben left them in a hole, but there are worse things that can happen to you, and at least Georgia had a ton of niceties to sell off before she had to live on the street. She didn’t really push herself to make her life better, instead she was simply determined to re-discover the missing money, and sully her husband’s name in the process. (Some things are clearly better left unearthed, if the conclusion of the novel is anything to go by.)

I was just very disappointed with the novel, it didn’t grip me, the lives on the New York elite just wasn’t interesting to me because these are people who would never know what it’s really like to be poor. I could understand Georgia’s concerns, and I felt sad for her situation, but I wanted her to pull up her socks and motor through. The writing, too, was hoity-toity and I just wasn’t sure characters would really speak to each other the way they did. I did, however, like the use of first- and third-person narrative, I thought that was cleverly done, so kudos to Koslow for being able to pull that off, not many authors dabble in using different narratives for one book. Sadly The Widow Waltz just wasn’t for me. Many will enjoy the novel, and it probably is a fantastic beach read, it just wasn’t my kind of beach read, it was a one of those novels that’s just a bit too clever for me.