This book ended up being disappointing in the sense that it simply didn’t manage to live up to the hype around it for me. I’ve been seeing its cover pop up everywhere around its publication date in 2019 and 2020, whereas I finally only got to it about 3 years later myself. Having read it on vacation, it ended up being a nice page-turner, without much depth to it though. To this day, I’m not really able to understand its high rating or its place on so many different bestseller lists.

The story within it revolves around a family and the house that they live in, as mentioned in the title, the Dutch House. There are quite a few mysteries around both the house, as well as the family, which you’re eager to get to the bottom of as a reader. This was what kept me going to read the 337 pages in just about 4 days. The book started off with somewhat of a vibe of “The Secret Garden“, a book that I read ages ago and enjoyed a lot. I would therefore see potential within it being more appealing to younger readers and the target audience of young adults, who might be interested in a coming of age story of two siblings. Its style was kept very simple, with parts of it sounding quite cheesy, resulting in the first reduction in the rating that I decided to make:

‘Did you love him?’ May asked Maeve, and Maeve said, ‘L’aimais-tu.’

‘L’aimais-tu?’ May asked my mother, because some questions are best posed in French.

p. 293

To mention the positive parts, I really enjoyed how the novel was written with a sense of humour, even during the most serious parts. The way the narrative was put together, the unexpected jumps in time, revealing what was going to happen in the future without getting rid of one’s curiosity to read on, became something that I would look forward to. The decisive moments were usually explained with a delay, so that you wanted to go on and on, page after page, until you would find out the whole story.

She leaned over to light her cigarette off the stove’s gas flame.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’ What I meant to say was, ‘You are my sister, my only relation. Do not put your face in the fucking fire.’

p. 101

Other themes that were touched upon and that I found interesting were: the relationship between siblings, especially how it develops through the years in one’s life; the choices made for one’s future, how actively these are decided on one’s own side; the relationships within a family, how we hardly ever get to know our parents as the humans that they actually are on a deeper level and the question of how much the events in our lives are related to chance, wondering how differently everything could have ended up due to the smallest changes in our behaviour:

I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him.

p. 99

Had I not been close to failing, I wouldn’t have been reading chemistry on the train. Had I not been reading chemistry on the train, I wouldn’t have met Celeste, and my life as I have known it would never have been set in motion.

p. 144

Summing everything up, what highly contributed to the rating of 3/5 ★, meaning that I neither completely disliked the book, nor crazily enjoyed it, was its ending. It felt really rushed in its development in comparison to how the rest of the story unfolded. To me, it seemed a bit naive, as if things were sugar-coated to make a happy ending possible, as well as being a bit too predictable. I’m generally not the biggest fan of “happily ever after” storylines, so this might be a very subjective perception. In any case, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest this book to anyone else outside the target audience of young adult readers.

★★★☆☆ (3/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-06-302339-0
Harper, 2019}