"So if you do business with an Arab, oh, of course, you can haggle over a brace of partridges in the street. But if it's a matter of importance, you might spend many hours drinking mint tea and talking of other things. You wait until each has decided whether he is dealing with someone he can trust. If there is no trust, there is no point in signing a piece of paper. This they understand."
The English Understand Wool
written by Hellen DeWitt
This novella has one of the most satisfying endings I’ve read lately. I remember giving a whoop and punching the air, cackling like a supervillain. It’s best to go into this book with as little information as possible to fully enjoy this snack of a story, but I will toe that line for you here because if you don’t have enough information, why would you bother to read it?
This book is told from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old girl who was raised in extreme wealth. In the first of this book’s short chapters this girl tells you about how meticulously her mother shops for fabrics. The English understand wool and the Scots don’t. We get a glimpse into the globetrotting errands of the narrator’s mother, and just when we think, “so what?”, another voice chimes in with the same sentiment.
This other voice critiques our affluent narrator and urges her to get to the good stuff. The good stuff?! Our narrator declines, returning to the superficial details of her fashionable world. And that’s when I leaned it. I dare not say more because I found real joy in uncovering the secret of what this other voice is trying to get the narrator to write and the story of why this voice wants the narrator to share so badly.
I promise it’s juicy. And I promise it’s fun. I hope this is enough to get you intrigued. Remember, it has a smashing ending, a secret plot, and it’s only 69 pages. Grab some fancy English tea and pastries and read about cloth until it turns into something more salacious.
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