They have an extraordinarily close sibling relationship that isn’t corny or saccharine. The appeal and magic of this book is the relationship between Danny and Maeve.

I half expected her to offer Maeve an apple after consulting a magic mirror, but she’s content to throw them out of their home (the titular Dutch House) upon their father’s death. Their new stepmother, Andrea, is a caricature of an evil stepmother. Their mother left when they were young and their father eventually remarries. The Dutch House follows siblings Danny and Maeve over a period of decades. He “acts” the dialogue in an understated way and doesn’t use a high-pitched voice for female characters. I thought he was reading too quickly at first, even checking the playback speed, but he won me over by the second chapter. Quick note on the audiobook: Tom Hanks does a stellar job. “He had protected me from the world so completely,” Danny laments of his late father, “that I had no idea what the world was capable of.I’ve listened to Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House twice and hate the ending as much as I love the beginning, which makes it hard to evaluate. Motherless and inseparable, the young Conroys are suspicious of their intended stepmother, who, sure enough, eventually drives Maeve from her home and attempts to disinherit both stepchildren in favor of her two daughters once Cyril has died. There is a similar transparency, at first glance, to the novel’s main characters: Cyril Conroy, a real-estate magnate his teenage daughter, Maeve his adolescent son, Danny and Cyril’s soon-to-be-wife, Andrea. across the long marble floor of the foyer, through the observatory, and catch sight of the lilacs waving obliviously in the garden behind the house.”

“Not only could you see into the Dutch House,” the narrator explains of its vast windows, “from the driveway you could let your eye go up the front steps.

Built with tobacco money in an era when “ready-made cigarettes lined up in their cartons were a luxury for the rich, as were acres never walked on by the people who owned them,” this 1920s Pennsylvania residence seems constructed of glass and light. But the Dutch House is also unmistakably American. The dominant figure in Ann Patchett’s new novel, “The Dutch House,” is in many ways the house itself, a captivating childhood home that later becomes, as one character puts it, “the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country.” Like the Flyte family’s castle in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” this grandiose mansion holds the past entombed and its inhabitants enthralled.

Book review the dutch house