How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

This book is a kind of romance with novelistic intentions. The novel's protagonist, Abby Randolph is a small-time antiques dealer (she deals out of a stall in an antiques "mall"). Her mother has left her a few things and a knack for antiques. Her father has moved to California with his much younger wife. Her boyfriend and fellow antique dealer has recently left her for a better-connected and financed woman. This is the state of affairs as the novel opens.

Then, Abby, at the urging of her kindly antique stall neighbor, takes a chamber pot to the Antiques Road Show, and her life is turned upside down. The chamber pot turns out to be worth a lot of money, her-ex-best-friend and ex-fiancee (a brother and sister) sue her for half of the money, and she takes up with a rakish reporter.

All is neatly sorted out by the end of the story, with Abby happily settled down with the right man and a future that fits.

Pleasant but inconsequential.