This summer, my daughter tried sleep-away camp for the first time. How many ways can one spell the word DISASTER? She was so excited beforehand: she had her bag packed a week early, all the white tennis clothes in piles, along with the pink shirts that were supposed to prove that she was a girl not (as blind people tend to assume) a boy. Alas, in the first five minutes, she was directed to the boys’ dormitory. By the girls who turned out to be her new roommates. It went downhill from there.

Those of you who are parents know that parenting is (secretly) just a lesson in cutting you down to size. In the art of making your heart break and your temper flare at the very same moment.

But you know what? It’s possible to escape. My personal escape this last week was Julia Quinn’s newest, utterly delightful novel, What Happens in London. When I think of Julia’s novels, what comes to mind is a world in which mean girls (like those roommates) never triumph. In which the hero and heroine may well have surmounted a really tough, humiliating childhood, but they turned into thoroughly decent, thoroughly lovable and really terrific people. The kind you want to be your friend. Your daughter.

Sir Harry Valentine is one of my absolute favorite heroes. His childhood really was harrowing—his father was a drunk. A sloppy, vomiting, peeing-in-his-pants, careless drunk. The kind who dies falling out a window, and can never really remember (or care for) his children. Yet Harry has grown into a deeply sensitive, somewhat somber, adorable man who spends his days translating Russian documents for the War Office.

That is, until he moves next door to Olivia Bevelstoke, who promptly begins spying on him from her bedchamber window. Now Olivia is spying due to some delicious, if erroneous, gossip about a fiancée whom Harry never had. But the story is really from window-to-window, as Harry and Olivia flirt and quarrel and read aloud from a somewhat tawdry, hysterical gothic novel, Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron.

This novel is vintage Julia Quinn: a frolic about people whom you’d love to know—but a frolic that never becomes too light, never skims into Mad Baron territory. Harry has a truly difficult childhood, and Olivia, for all her beauty and her charm, is dangerously close to either expiring from boredom, or marrying a Russian prince when Harry moves next door. This is not a novel that avoids real life. But it makes real life, all of it – alcoholic parents and spoiled children – seem like a somber refrain quickly replaced by a joyful crescendo. In short: read this novel to remind yourself that children grow up, that independence can be had, that love is real.

~buy this book~