Review: A Stifled Free Spirit And A Buttoned Down Professor
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 28, 2013
It's probably not a good sign for your romance when your hot date begins your relationship with the promise "I'll teach you".  He did.  Their courtship and marriage was one long series of tips, corrections, and lectures on which organizations to join (or avoid), on how to dress, what to eat, how to fix her hair, how to impress his colleagues, how to be everything but herself.  Sometime during their ten year marriage, she grew up and he failed to notice, continuing to treat her like the bewildered 19 year old girl he married and transplanted into a very conservative and uptight academic community.  I liked this book for a nice easygoing summer read.  There wasn't buckets of angst or terrifying threats to overcome (unless you fear death by lecture about the necessity of sufficient roughage in your diet).It's something of a cautionary tale on two very mismatched people.  He was a 30 year old physics professor and she was a backward 19 years old when they met.  She was dazzled by him and he doted on her, seeing a gem that he could polish into the perfect dean's wife.  Trouble was, he never stopped trying to polish, reshape, and educate his now mature and increasingly unhappy wife.  She had visions of herself ending like her mother, so subsumed by her husband's dominant personality that hers withered away and she simply had nothing left of herself to live for when he died, so she followed him.  the pressure has been building for a while and it finally blows at an award dinner when hubby makes one too many comments on what he thought she should have worn.  Gotta love a woman who will bash her husband over the head with a tray of tomato aspic at his own banquet and run wailing into the night.She runs three thousand miles to the lighthouse she inherited from her grandfather and sets up a new life dedicated to exploring the delights of red meat, chocolate, deliberate vegetable avoidance, and doing what she pleases for a change.  Chewing over an unpalatable but well deserved serving in what not to say to your wife at a social function, the professor waits a month for her to come to her senses.  When he's served divorce papers in the middle of an important lecture instead, he does a little top blowing himself and takes a sabbatical to track down his exasperating, but enchanting wife to set everything straight and bring her home.  The difficulty of the job he's taken on begins to dawn on him when he arrives just in time for the burning of the dean's wife ceremony featuring his wife incinerating on a bonfire the trappings of her old life with appropriate commentary.  He expands it to include a burning of the divorce papers and lets her know he is sticking to her like glue until they work out their problems.So, follows a tale of two people, one working out ten years of suppressed frustration, embarrassment, and feelings of inadequacy, by doing her best to be a burr under her husband's hide and frequently acting much like that long suppressed 19 year old; and the professor, who seems to have been born 30 years old and has no talent for being younger, trying to bring his wife to heel and coax her back into her well-worn rut.  He is counting on his secret weapon, the fact that they have always been on fire in bed.  She, however, is well aware of this weakness and is not falling for it--the dean's wife is definitely dead.As both professor and wannabe free spirit expand their campaign from the lighthouse into the community at large, lessons are learned on both sides.  The professor learns that, yes, he can relate to people on a common level (although he really has trouble breaking the lecturing habit).  It's even fun when he manages to get a role in the play his wife is also working in, and he learns how to be carefree for the first time.  He realizes he has never seen his wife as a capable adult and is amazed that she is writing a book, has a publisher, and can take care of herself without his guidance.  She learns that there are painful, never revealed reasons for his tightly controlled persona that he defensively clings to, even at the cost of allowing himself to be injured rather than fighting with a would be replacement for him in his wife's life.  She also learns the drawback of a chocolate by choice lifestyle is the need for dieting.  They both learn that they are really bad at communicating with each other and they both still are deeply in love, despite their differences in personality.As time is running out on his bid to regain his wife, and when you are sure you can see the relationship thawing into a viable partnership, the professor rears his ugly head again and puts forth his idea of what he sees of a compromise in their life--she can wear her hair curly and they will eat red meat a couple of times a week (maybe three if they are feeling really frisky).  Everything else goes back to what it was before.  The heroine shows her strength here by refusing to resurrect the dean's wife.  She's dead and staying that way, and her husband must accept that and let his wife be herself or they have no basis for a relationship any more.  That's the question it all comes down to. Do they each move on or find a mutually acceptable compromise?  Does the dean's wife make some sort of comeback,or does the professor have the courage to burn the dean?  Do they end up with each other, or find new partners and build their lives separately?there is not much in the way of sexual content, but it does crop up.  Not a steamy read, but not a clean one either.  This story relies on the changes in people as they try to muddle out a life that satisfies both, and it does that very well.Read it.  You will have a very interesting story that kind of makes you think (a bad thing in the summer, I know but--what are you going to do?  Sometimes they're sneaky that way).