#29: Sleeping Tiger, Rosamunde Pilcher

I really love this book, and all of Rosamunde Pilcher's for that matter, although I've never gotten around to The Shell Seekers, her most famous. There's not much to them -- they are generally about a lonely person who gets surprised by love in an unusual place, but they're sweet and hopeful novels.

I hadn't read Sleeping Tiger since 1997 (the first year I started keeping a list of the books I'd read for the year), but saw it sitting there on the shelf beckoning to me. The book is about Selina Bruce, a 20-year-old orphan who's about to marry the wrong man. She's been brought up as a proper young English lady by her grandmother, who's recently died, and she's always done what's expected of her. And the plain girl is about to marry her grandmother's junior lawyer, mostly because she feels she has no other options. Until one day, her fiance gives her a book called Fiesta at Cala Fuerte. The author's photo on the back looks exactly like a photo she once saw of her father, who supposedly died in the war right before Selina was born. So the former wallflower runs off to the Spanish island of San Antonio to find her father and, not unexpectedly, she blossoms. I guess what I most like about it is the idea that you can escape to find yourself...and a glorious setting in the Mediterranean doesn't hurt.

Yeah, the Med. I got all excited to find my own San Antonio, which according to the book is located in the Balearics. But alas, a little Googling tells me it's a made-up island; the closest I could find was the club-land town of San Antonio on Ibiza. Still, there are five real Balearic islands -- perhaps peace and love could be found on Formentera or the one I'd never heard of, Cabrera?

In reading it again, I realize how much I've changed since I first read it (which was not 1997, btw). For one, I see now that the romance between Selina and George Dyer happens way too quickly and without much reason (which is okay, I still love the book). I also found all the vocabulary words I'd highlighted way back when -- words like acquiescence and aversion -- and it's hard to believe that I didn't know what they meant. But, most funny, I also now know that some of the Spanish phrases used in the book are incorrect, like when the Spanish police officer tells her "No hablo Inglese" (umm, "inglés") or when George tells Selina that ella should be pronounced "elya" (as opposed to "a-ya").

Most interesting, at the end of the book, on the inside of the back cover, I found a name and address written in my own handwriting. Problem is, I have no idea who this girl is, where I might have met her, or why I wrote her address down. Hmm.