Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters (review)

Eleven-year-old Cornelia Englehart is the lonely, disaffected daughter of a world-famous concert pianist. Everywhere she goes, she disappears behind her mother's reputation, so she shuns social contact, erecting a wall of obfuscatory verbiage to shut down conversation and gain the privacy she thinks she craves. A new neighbor changes all that: an elderly writer with a wealth of stories and life experience to draw from, Virginia welcomes Cornelia as a kindred spirit, and the two spend hours together as Virginia tells of the wondrous adventures she had with her sisters as they traveled the world in the 1950s. Each story wraps a little too conveniently around Cornelia's own problem du jour—if her mother is in Morocco or Paris, Virginia takes Cornelia on a mental excursion to Marrakech or the City of Light; if she is feeling competitive with her mother, a story about Virginia's competitive sisters will follow—making Cornelia's emotional growth through the narrative trajectory seem rather contrived. Virginia's stories require a sophisticated palate to fully appreciate the hijinks of single women of unlimited wealth globe-trotting in a post World War II environment; more engaging for young readers is Cornelia's own story of loneliness cured by an exotic, wise friend who has turned her apartment into a pleasure garden. Blume establishes immediate empathy for the child neglected by her overbusy, glamorous parent and constructs Virginia as so perfectly sympathetic that her death comes as a stunning, if not unpredictable, blow. While the book's overall appeal may narrow to fans of old movies and to readers enamored of mental travel to far-off destinations in a simpler time, those readers will find much to sink their teeth into here.