Paradise Lodge

September 19, 2016
If Cassandra from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle was a teenager in the 1970s working at a Leicestershire nursing home, she would be just like Lizzie Vogel, the narrator of Stibbe’s latest. Lizzie, a schoolgirl who just wants to make enough money to buy Linco Beer shampoo, takes a job as an auxiliary nurse at Paradise Lodge, an old folks’ home as close to death as some of its residents. Her grades suffer as she almost single-handedly runs the home while the supposed adults in charge take advantage of her earnestness. The matron expects her to miss class to fill in shifts, the owner abandons all thought of laundry, and the trained nurses leave her in charge of patients. Even though she’s only 15, Lizzie cares deeply about both the other staff and the residents, many of whom could have easily become caricatures but instead are as richly drawn as the dilapidated manor house in which they live. Stibbe (Man at the Helm) manages to make Lizzie sincere and naïve without being syrupy or precious, and creates a story that helps readers understand human nature a little better.

May 15, 2016
An English teenager with a rackety home life finds part-time work in a local retirement home and encounters old people, eccentricity, gossip, and death.Lizzie Vogel was 10 when she narrated the first tragicomic installment of life with her family in Stibbe's fiction debut (Man at the Helm, 2015); now it's 1977, and she's 15 and no longer needs to search for a partner for her fragile mother or a substitute father for herself and her siblings. These days, home includes tolerant Mr. Holt and a new baby, and Lizzie can concentrate on other distractions: school, friends, better shampoo, and--after taking a job as "auxiliary nurse" at Paradise Lodge, a home for the elderly--bodily functions and mortality. On her very first day of work ("boring, slightly exciting and briefly horrible"), Lizzie glimpses a corpse in the morgue ("I'd seen a dead man's toe") and will later experience the demises of several more patients. (Elvis, Marc Bolan, and Maria Callas also meet their ends in this volume.) Meanwhile, her role at the Lodge includes assisting the elderly clients, helping them (frequently) to the bathroom, and weathering the peculiar comings and goings of patients and staff alike. Stibbe's deadpan first-person delivery once again balances quirky charm with beady insight while this new chapter in Lizzie's life introduces a larger community of characters. As in the earlier book, the plot is episodic, charting upsets in the lives of the kindly and the kooky, underpinned by Lizzie's search for some kind of momentum and meaning. Looser and less unified than the first book until near the end, the novel closes on a celebratory note, knitting multiple loose ends together and propelling frequent-truant Lizzie back to school to fulfill her potential as "an intellect-ual."Another deft helping of absurd social comedy and unconventional wisdom from a writer of singular, decidedly English gifts.

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July 1, 2016
After working to secure a partner for her mother in Man at the Helm (2015), Lizzie Vogel is back. Now 15, she's picked up a job at Paradise Lodge, a Leicester home for the aging that has fallen on hard times (and everything is about to get harder). Lizzie is surprised by how much she enjoys the monotonous tasks of the job, such as making tea and washing dentures. She enjoys it so much, in fact, her already impressive truancy now threatens to bump her back a year if she can't get herself to attend classes now and again. The home provides English writer Stibbe's novel with an incredible patchwork of characters and their eccentricities, and Lizzie's observations of her family, coworkers, geriatric charges, and sundry enemies are wise, hilarious, and of an emotional frankness that's all her own. There's plot aplenty, but Lizzie is the real draw here. Stibbe's popular nanny letter collection, Love, Nina (2014), has been adapted as a BBC sitcom, and her fictional world is no less screenworthy and soaked through with charm.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)