When they are evicted, Maeve is in college and working as a bookkeeper for a frozen vegetable company. The siblings form a unique bond Maeve filling the role of mother to her younger brother Danny. Andrea adores the house she cares much less for Danny and Maeve whom she kicks out as soon as Cyril’s body is laid in his grave. A few years after their mother’s abandonment, Cyril remarries Andrea, a much younger woman who moves in with her two young daughters, Norma and Bright. Cyril hires two sisters, Sandy and Jocelyn, to cook and clean and assist with childcare. There is a ballroom on the top floor, entire walls of glass, ornate ceilings, six bedrooms, a swimming pool, and portraits of the original owners in gilded frames. The house is as much a character in the novel as Danny and Maeve. Overwhelmed by the mansion, which was owned by a Dutch couple who made their fortune in cigarettes, their mother abandons the family to serve the poor in India. Their father, Cyril, a real estate investor, purchases The Dutch House completely furnished by the previous owners as a gift for their mother. The story is told from the point of view of Danny, eight years younger than his sister Maeve and traverses their early childhood up through middle age. Like many of Patchett’s novels, The Dutch House explores family – not of the nuclear sort, but the family we create when things go awry. Ann Patchett’s eighth novel, The Dutch House, is the story of brother and sister Danny and Maeve Conroy who are disinherited after their father’s untimely death.
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