The Choral Society (Paperback)

Reviews

Reviewed by duettists - 9 July 2012

Three women meet in a choral group and each one has a short-coming. By the end of the book they resolve their problems in one way or another. As a musician who has conducted several choirs in my career I thought this book would be of great interest to me. Admittedly the three main characters meet because they join a choral group, but the book deals with their separate lives and we hardly hear much about the choral society at all, except that the scratch group starts off singing Gospel songs and later is rehearsing for a performance of "Messiah". One of the three women is a food-writer and, as in previous Prue Leith novels, there is far too much about cooking methods and ingredients, and descriptions of the meals the various characters eat. There are also too many details about the clothes they wear and the names of contemporary dress designers. There is even a very detailed description about a medical procedure to remove excess fluid from one of the character's knees! How could the editor of this book have overlooked so much slang, clichés, and a whopper about "the laird in the manse" which upset my Scottish sensibilities. Doesn't everybody know that a minister inhabits a manse? What was a laird doing there? Admittedly there was a performance of "Messiah" towards the end of the book, but it appeared to be done by chorus only without any mention of soloists. After the disappointment of this book I doubt whether I'll be buying any more of Prue Leith fiction, although my cooking might benefit from reading one of her cookery books!