This was not one of Maeve Binchy's better books. She had too many characters and subplots going on, so that none of them felt fully developed. I guess all best-selling authors are pressured to churn out books, but it shows when their hearts aren't in it. I've seen it happen with Elizabeth George, John Grisham, Larry McMurtry, Michael Crichton, etc. The publishers want to keep the money rolling in, but a bad book can cause a backlash of disappointed fans who may transfer their affections. It took me years to return to Patricia Cornwell after I read her awful "Blowfly".
In this book, a group of tourists interact with each other and with the locals in a small Greek village, while we learn bits and pieces of their lives--but not enough of the details to really cause us to care about them. They're all troubled characters whose problems get miraculously solved by book's end, but I felt like yawning. I have loved most of Binchy's books, so this one was a real disappointment for me.
I had pre-painted these two pages with nothing in mind at the time. I used several different shades of blue, just randomly brushing them on. I certainly wasn't consciously trying to create the look of water, but I guess my muse was. When I had first brushed on the dark paint, it rippled the page near the gutter, so when I brushed on the lighter color it only hit the tops of the ripples. But now the page is perfectly flat after being pressed under a weight.
The picture is from a travel book about Greece, and the postcards are a rubberstamp from Aspects of Design. I stamped it twice on manilla CS, and cut them apart, then reassembled for a dimensional look. I glued a real fiber right on top of the stamped string. The title is my attempt at a modified Italic after a class taken with Sharon Zeugin.
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