Review Kate Morris Seven Year Itch

12 May 2009

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Meet Ellie. She's been married to Jack for seven years, has two occasionally-adorable-but-mostly-demanding children and is about to open a café with her friend, Tilda. But Jack is a soap actor whose long-running character has been killed off, leaving him hanging around the house and getting under the feet of Petra, an au pair too glamorous for her own good - even if she is a dab hand with glitter and glue.

Meanwhile Ellie's excitement about the café is making her marriage seem dreary in comparison and when the gorgeous Mark moves in next door (with a wife in tow, admittedly) she asks herself when she and Jack went past their sell-by-date.

How can she put the sizzle back into her love life without breaking the rules? And is there really something better out there - or is she just scratching a classic seven year itch?

The Seven Year Itch is Kate Morris at her best recounting a tale that is at times bleak and at others funny. Kate Morris illustrates a sympathetic portrait of a marriage that's honeymoon years are well in the past and offers real insight and genuinely funny observations on what marriage is like!

The novel would give any sitcom a run for it's money

Buy Seven Year Itch

Extract:

It was early Friday morning when I murdered my husband. He was standing on the edge of a white cliff looking out to sea. It was a tiny, tentative push but he lost his balance and fell, shouting, ‘Why, Ellie? Why?’ The seagulls squawked and screamed overhead, swopping down menacingly towards me. My head rushed with a dizzying wave of adrenalin. The strange fizzing and frothing sensation reminded me of when I was a child and had dared myself to do something dangerous like walking across the road with my eyes half closed.

After he had crashed on to the rocks below, my six-year-old son ran towards me screaming, ‘I HATE YOU, MUMMY,’ while my little girl turned puce and sat on the grass shouting, ‘I WANT MY DADDY!’ I woke with a shudder, panicked and stricken with grief and remorse. He was sitting naked on his side of the bed, pulling on his boxer shorts. It was such a relief that he was alive that I made a vow never to take him for granted again. My heartbeat slowed but I was still shaking.

‘What’s the matter, angel?’ he asked tenderly. ‘You look sad and pale.’

‘Awful dream,’ I croaked, not wanting to admit the truth while he was being so kind. ‘Jed fell off a cliff and I couldn’t get to him in time.’

‘That’s very dark, Ellie.’ He was humouring me; as though I were a wife in Victorian England and all I needed to do to put myself right was to inhale some vapours. ‘That’s terrible. Who was with him?’ Jack was pulling on his trousers; his bum looked a little flabby.

‘You, I think,’ I said, stretching my toes under the duvet.

‘Oh, so you’re blaming me, even in your dreams. Don’t you see you’re blaming me for everything in our life at the moment?’

‘I’m not blaming you; you just asked who was with him. To say that I blame you for everything in our life is paranoid psychobabble.’

Jack left the room; I could hear him turning the taps on in the bathroom. The water gushed out, pounding savagely against the basin. I pulled on my once-white dressing gown that had lost its belt and needed a wash and pushed open the door.

‘Jack, I’m very glad that you’re still here,’ I mumbled. He was looking in the mirror. Jack was a good-looking man. He had dark-blond hair that was greying at the sides, very bright blue eyes and a kind but mischievous face. He usually wore cashmere polo-neck jumpers through the winter and Ralph Lauren T-shirts in summer. He was neither tall nor short. When he was at home, he wore glasses that made him look more serious than he than he really was. He was a vibrant man who found it hard to sit still and he liked to laugh. About twice a year he would lose his temper and we would cower in corners around the house until he had calmed down.

I was a little taller than him, and my body shape was slimmer. I had long dark-blond hair that was slightly frizzy and never looked neat and my skin was pale, whereas his was darker. His eyes were wide and trusting, but mine were narrow and almond-shaped, coloured brown.

‘It was actually you who fell off the cliff in the dream.’

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