I seem to be very dissatisfield lately with cover art and now titles, too! Noble's The Girl Next Door is not about one girl and even after finishing it I am confused a bit about who Eve (presumably the title character) and her husband Ed's next door neighbor's actually are. However, it was a very enjoyable novel with enough depth to hold your interest.
Eve and Ed move from their idyllic English cottage to an apartment in New York City after Ed accepts a lucrative promotion at his bank. Ed is thrilled with the fast pace of the city, but Eve misses her garden, her family, and England. Noble introduces the reader to all of the apartment building's inhabitants by way of a character list at the beginning of the novel, and multiple chapters scattered throughout the book focus on each of the tenants and their interactions with one another. The tenants include Violet Wallace, an elderly transplanted English woman; Charlotte, a shy, awkward single woman who lives more in fantasy than reality; an aimless young man living on his trust fund; a male gay couple; a beautiful triathlete; a "perfect" couple with 3 children; a troubled couple with seemingly insurmountable problems in their marriage; and a predatory, sex-obsessed twenty-something woman, among others.
Overall, I enjoyed the development of the relationships among the characters and the evolution of the tenants themselves. Each of them changes, some positively, some negatively, as a result of their interactions with the others. Running throughout the novel are the stories of Eve's pregnancy and Violet's life in America and the friendship that develops between the two women. Highly recommended!
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