The Mulberry Tree
Grade : F

Reading The Mulberry Tree was like watching somebody else's home movies. Somebody you don't know very well, and don't really like all that much. Never mind that they charged you $25 (hardcover) for the privilege. With the exception of a beta hero who managed to capture my interest, I'm still shaking my head at what I just read.

Let us begin with Chapter 1, which is told in the first person. This chapter introduces the heroine, Lillian Bailey Manville, wife of multi-billionaire, James Manville. Lillian is awakened by her husband's attorney, Phillip Waterman, who tells her that Jimmie's private plane has gone down, and her husband of twelve, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years is dead. (Note: Throughout the story, each of these numbers is given for the length of time Lillian and James were married, so it's anybody's guess.)

Chapter 2 takes us to Calburn, Virginia (I don't know where we began, it is never mentioned), but now the story shifts to the third person, and we are in Phillip Waterman's POV. Quickly, however, we are switched to Lillian's, but at no point in the book do we ever return to first person. (Note: Much head-hopping + many characters + many POVs = Big Headache for Me.)

The next shocker comes when Phillip informs Lillian that she has inherited nothing. No thing. Nada. Zip. Jimmie left his billions, his businesses, his twelve homes, and so forth, to his older sister and brother, Atlanta and Ray, whom he actively despised. Lillian has been bequeathed $50,000 and a very old farmhouse in the backwoods of Virginia. In the predawn hours, Phillip ushers Lillian to a department store where she buys everything she will need to furnish the farmhouse, as well as some new clothing and a car. It seems the evil Atlanta has already laid claim to Lillian's house and jewelry and clothing (they are the same dress size!), and has thugs waiting for her at the door who won't let Lillian back into her own home to gather a few personal articles. (Note: Bulls**t.)

Phillip escorts Lillian to Virginia. By this time six weeks have passed. Lillian has lost a hundred pounds, had a nose job, and changed her name to Bailey James. I am so not kidding. (See Note above.) Lillian/Bailey refuses to contest the will and get at least a few mill for the years she was married to Jimmie (not to mention the jewelry he gave her as gifts, her tootbrush and undies). Her reasoning?

"What you don't understand," she said quietly, "is that there is more to life than money. Tell me, if you were a billionaire, and you died and left your wife nothing, would she fight for it? Or would she love the memory of you more than your money?"

After I stopped laughing hysterically, I thought, "In a heartbeat, honey! Let me at 'em!"

The crux of why Lill, uh, Bailey, won't fight is three-fold: She doesn't want the media attention. Really. Can you believe it? Also, she lied about her age when she married Jimmie and believes their marriage is void so she couldn't contest the will even if she wanted to, which she doesn't. Really. And, Jimmie left her a note in case of his untimely demise that read, "Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me. And remember that I love you." While this is all very sweet, a note with a bit more detail (names, dates, addresses) would have saved Bailey a lot of work, and me having to read the remaining 380 pages. (Note: These three premises were not only ridiculous, when the truth is finally revealed, it means nothing. Bailey sets about to do what she wouldn't have had to do if she'd just contested the will.)

Okay, so, now we're in Virginia. Characters are introduced. Oodle and tons of characters, including dead ones, crazy ones, old ones, and very convenient ones. Matt Longacre, the hero of this story, is an architect who has returned home to Calburn after a divorce. When he discovers Bailey is a great cook, he makes a deal with her. He will repair her truly uninhabitable farmhouse in return for her letting him rent a room. Oh, and she does the cooking. Bailey is lonely and stuck out in the middle of nowhere, so she agrees. Matt and Bailey rub along pretty well, but if you're looking for two people who can't keep their hands off each other, you won't find it here: "Matt wasn't the problem. He was a nice man. She liked him. There wasn't much fire between them, but it was comfortable, something that she could live with."

Would it have been so hard to have had a little sexual tension between these two? Something to keep me from feeling like I was in a coma? Like they were in a coma? They do eventually have sex, but I wondered just how into it Boring Bailey could have been with an attitude like that?

Well, we've covered The Women's Fiction aspect of the story, and a bit of The Romance phase. Now we come to The Mystery Part. (See me take a deep breath before plunging in here.) To make a long story short, this book has a mystery. It's not much of a mystery and it takes the whole book to get to what the reader has pretty much figured out by then anyway. The last dimension is The Suspense Part, which goes hand-in-hand with The Mystery Part, but not very well. There's a group of boys/men called The Golden Six whose histories and backgrounds take up a huge amount of space, and which makes for pretty dull reading. There's an evil woman politician who wrote a book about them, destroying them. There's a suicide (or was it?), and there's Atlanta and Ray, whom we never really see. And there's Violet and Alex and Frank and Luke and Carol and Rick and Martha and Burgess and Patsy and Dolores and Arleen . . . .

Problems? Oh, yes. There were problems. Bailey insists she wants to do things on her own, but when the chips are down, some man (Jimmie, Phillip, Matt) steps in to handle the rough stuff. So much for character development. Bailey is 32, yet she was married to Jimmie for sixteen years (by her count), but since she was married at 17, that would make her 33, but there are so many discrepancies, I gave up on the math in this story early on. The legal aspects alone are astonishing, unbelievable, and thoroughly ludicrous. Also, Bailey spends most of her time cooking. Cooking and cooking and cooking. If she's not cooking, she's thinking about cooking or what to cook or is shopping for food or is feeding somebody. Long paragraphs, page after page, describe the purchase, preparation and/or consumption of food. And Jimmie - how did a boy who came out of the woods when he was sixteen, completely uneducated, disfigured, and de-socialized, become a multi-billionaire by the time he was twenty-six (or thirty-one, depending)? Hm? We are given no clue as to how James Manville made his money.

Jimmie may have loved his wife, but he treated her badly, kept her fat, controlled and isolated her. He was selfish and even cruel. I think the author intended that we think well of Jimmie (for all his faults, he loved his wife?), but the fact of the matter is, he talked about her behind her back with his horrid hanger-on friends, he cheated on her countless times, and in the end, he left her nothing, "for her own good." (Note: With friends like Jimmie...)

Bailey gathers all her information from people in old folks' homes or printed matter or the Internet (with Matt acting as the driving force). We are told scenarios throughout the book, rather than watching them unfold naturally. There are side-plots and sub-plots and characters who were meant to be colorful, but who were only bizarre. I never cared for Bailey, who ended up the same doormat she was at the beginning of the book. She is a very weak heroine. People with valuable information (and lots of it!) pop up out of nowhere to move the plot forward. If Matt hadn't had such a nice sense of humor, this would have been a straight-F read for me.

Well, there you have it. I thought the title of the book and the cover art were pretty, but that's about as far as my appreciation for this nonsense went. There was one thing I did get from this book, however. The next time I make homemade jam, I'm going to follow Bailey's lead and add a little ginger.

Reviewed by Marianne Stillings
Grade : F
Book Type: Fiction

Sensuality: Kisses

Review Date : July 5, 2002

Publication Date: 2003

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