The Dream House.

The Dream House By Rachel Hore.

Everyone has a dream of their perfect house - in the heart of the countryside, or perhaps a stately residence in the middle of a wonderful city?

For Kate Hutchinson, the move to Suffolk from the tiny, noisy London terrace she shares with her husband Simon and their two young children is almost enough to make her dreams come true.

Space, peace, a rural pace of life have a far greater pull for Kate than the constantly overflowing in-tray on her desk at work. Moving in with her mother-in-law must surely be only a temporary measure before the estate agent's details of the perfect house fall through the letterbox.

But when Kate stumbles upon the house of her dreams, a beautiful place full of memories, it is tantalizingly out of reach. It's owner is the frail, elderly Agnes, whose story echoes so much of Kate's own. And Kate comes to realize how uncertain and unsettling a life built on dreams can be - wherever you are, at whatever time you are living and whoever you are with.

.... from the back cover.

Why has it become so popular for books, like THE DREAM HOUSE, a debut novel, to be written from the point of view of two people?

I'm sure that many readers will recognise some aspects of this story and even identify with it, and then, there will be others, such as myself, who will read it and think ' if only real life could always be like this, with the perfect, happy ending'.

A perfectly good, light read, with characters that I'm sure people will recognise, it's the storyline that lets it down. Predictable ( I figured out where the plot was going long before it actually got there), unconvincing, it relied far too much on the reader accepting flimsy coincidences and, at over 400 pages, too long, perhaps this is best read as a holiday novel.