High Time

Starred review from May 1, 2023
In this convulsively comic sequel to Rothschild’s House of Trelawney, eight years have passed since Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Trelawney, married older financier Sir Thomlinson Sleet, who bought her the Trelawneys’ decrepit castle. Now, in her husband’s frequent absence, Ayesha takes care of their daughter, Stella, and works to restore the property to its former glory. When Ayesha discovers Sleet plans to divorce her and sell the castle for millions of pounds that, according to her lawyer, she will never see, she embarks on an ingenious plan to buy the castle out from under Sleet. But how can she succeed when she only has £27,000 in the bank? Her complex scheme goes on to affect not only the other eccentric members of the extended Trelawney clan, but also a glamorous bitcoin billionaire married to an Albanian mobster and Sleet’s plan to run for MP on a nativist platform. The author makes Ayesha a virtuous heroine and Sleet a villain well worth hissing. With scenes that are over-the-top hilarious and a sharply satiric view of late-stage capitalism, this plays like a savvy cross between Brideshead Revisited and Succession as written by the Monty Python troupe.

June 1, 2023
The once-wealthy, forever-entitled British aristocrats who lost their ancestral mansion in the crash of 2008 in House of Trelawney (2020) face new challenges in 2016-2017. The focus here is on Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter rejected by the rest of the Trelawney family. Disdain turned to hatred after her wealthy husband, sleazy stock manipulator Sir Thomlinson Sleet, bought 800-year-old Trelawney Castle for her as a wedding present. Ayesha didn't marry for love, but she did think Sleet would bring her security, a belief that proves unfounded when he becomes infatuated with a sexy cryptocurrency con artist and casually decides to dump Ayesha and get custody of their 5-year-old daughter...just because. Insecure, status-seeking Sleet is a monster painted with such broad strokes he might as well have a mustache to twirl, and the rest of Rothschild's characterizations are equally clich�d. Despite her first-class degree and a prestigious art history prize, Ayesha comes across for 90% of the novel as a helpless victim; her only family ally, the Honourable Anthony Scott, is a stereotypical elderly gay man (an interior decorator, no less), and secondary characters like "aging minor royal" Princess Amelia are given to credulity-straining remarks such as, "In the good old days, 'help' had nowhere else to go....Now they have such highfalutin ideas. I blame the Chinese." To give Rothschild her due, she crafts an enjoyably complicated narrative that eventually enables Ayesha to stymie some of Sleet's nefarious plans and convince her hostile relatives she's not so bad after all. Brexit, Donald Trump's election, multiple financial shenanigans, and a clever scam involving risqu� paintings hidden away by Iran's puritanical regime are among the plot elements that will keep readers turning pages to find out what happens next. The abundance of machinations by a horde of not especially memorable characters, however, makes it likely that little of it will be remembered once the last chapter is finished. Moderately entertaining but very thin.

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June 1, 2023
When Rothschild's campy contemporary comedy of manners opens, it's 2016, and the Trelawney clan is once again dancing on the precipice of another crisis. Ayesha, the interloper from Rothschild's House of Trelawney (2020), is now the chatelaine of the 800-year-old castle, mired in a marriage to boorish financier Tomlinson Sleet (aka the Vulgarian) but also mother to the precocious four-year-old Stella. Sleet, an unsubtle mash-up of Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, has determined his eight-year marriage to Ayesha, beautiful as she may be, is past its sell-by date. He's become obsessed with the bikini-clad queen of cryptocurrency, Zamora, and gambles his wealth, reputation, and Ayesha's future on the vixen's Ponzi schemes. It's Brexit in the UK and the dawn of MAGA world in the U.S., a globally turbulent time that Rothschild personalizes through the challenges facing Ayesha and the rest of the Trelawney family, along with the soon-to-be married dowager Countess Clarissa and Ayesha's estranged sister Blaze. Downton Abbey fans and Jane Austen devotees will revel in Rothschild's saucy social satire.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.