The last two Neels books have both featured wicked sisters--vapid, soul-destroying, Gucci-scarf-stealing sisters whose final fate is to embroil themselves with shifty American husbands. Surely they are on the gilded path to eventual infamy. The slithery Larrys will be caught embezzling funds from their oil drilling companies or they will be named as co-respondant in the divorce proceedings of an Italian count and his film star wife or they will merely grow increasingly bionic as they chase their fleeting youth through plastic surgery...
And I love it. I love all of it. I roll around in it and splash. The moment an evil sister enters the stage and twirls her (sadly metaphorical) mustache, I do a little jig of anticipation. Evil sisters rule.
But, (and I don't know if you've noticed) I totally love my sisters. Betty Debbie and Betty Tia and Betty Suzanne and Betty Marcy and Betty Sherri...and all the others who are not yet Bettys but might be persuaded to the Dark Side. Sisters, in my vast experience of them, can be awe-some. And I have some of the awe-some-est.
Which begs the question: What do you find you love within the world of Neels that would utterly fail to charm in reality?
The luxurious bedrooms that our heroines get, once they have "conveniently" married. They tend to have plush cream carpet...the kind that your feet sink into...but you have to take your shoes off to walk on. Sounds heavenly, but unless I was fabulously wealthy, the thought of keeping those clean makes me shudder. In my opinion, carpets should be the color of dirt (thus speaks a mother of 5 boys).
ReplyDeleteIt was almost exactly 2 years ago that that picture was taken. February in Hawaii, now that's something I can get behind.
ReplyDeleteMy sisters hijacked my wedding shoes. They are evil.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they will be punished by marrying rich Americans...
ReplyDeleteBetty Debbie -- you are forgetting that lovely couple who live on site and do all the cooking, chauffeuring, etc., plus have people coming to do the "heavy" on a weekly basis. So have as much fitted cream plush carpet as you want!
ReplyDeleteMy pick for the utterly charmless character? The sociopathic. Whatsername from Tempestuous April, and isn't there a book where the oily Dutch "other man" virtually kidnaps the heroine? I don't like people who seem irredeemable. It's one thing for a Veronica sister or a [insert clever name of a Neels classic selfish & petulant mother character] to stick their expensively shod-feet out just to trip up the heroine (who is wearing out-of-fashion shoes so that aforementioned female relative might get what *she* wants) because those people *MIGHT* wake up and get a conscience. But the sociopaths won't ever, and that's not fun to read.
Betty Magdalen - you may be right about all that household help, but no amount of household help can keep those cream plush carpets clean after the happy couple have had a few kids. In the famous words of Betty Keira: "Children Ruin Everything."
ReplyDelete(I could really use someone to come in and do the "heavy" for me today - I am stuck making 7 nurses aprons for my niece's school play!!! SEVEN.(cue music from Oklahoma "I'm just a girl that can't say no..."))
I was going in a "Sound of Music" direction--"Seven children! But seven!"
ReplyDeleteI don't have kids; I'm not qualified to say. But cats ruin a lot of things; does that count? (Thinking about the hooked rugs that have multiple kitty-claw pulls...)
ReplyDelete"Cats Ruin Everything"...yeah, I think it works.
ReplyDeleteCats are the agents of entropy, I know that!
ReplyDelete