Vinegar Girl

Vinegar Girl
ISBN: 9780099589877
Publication Date: 20 March 2017

No one does family like Anne Tyler - and the Battistas might be her most appealing yetthe new novel from the bestselling author of A Spool of Blue Thread

Kate Battista is stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny

Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through

When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Will Kate be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round

Anne Tyler's brilliant retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as surprising as Kate herself.

Review by Anastasia Hadjidemetri

What do you do when you don't like a book Do you close it with a decisive thump, and resolve to never read works from that author again I certainly do. Then I might use the book as a door stopper, foot stool or even as a seat booster. (Yellow Pages are hard to come by these days.)

But what do you do if you don't like a book ... and you're a celebrated writer You re-write the whole book, obviously. Wait...what

That's what Anne Tyler has done. Confessing that she finds Shakespeare's plots terrible, and declaring Taming of the Shrew particularly outlandish, she set out to make the story more believable. To tone done the exaggerations.

So what do we have as a result

Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler's brilliant new novel. It's a love story. Not your average love story, though. It's funny. And it's witty. Our heroine is a sassy s...