A review by carolynf
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

2.0

The first 25% was an interesting period piece about a newly impoverished young woman and her mother trying to get by after WWI by taking in boarders - a young married couple. Which really was not smart since the mother was already concerned about her daughter's "sapphic" tendencies. They should have rented to very old ladies or something. The next 25% featured the two young women falling in love with each other very suddenly, but not at first sight. They meet and you expect them to go for each other right away, since it is a Sarah Waters novel. Instead they seem completely indifferent to one another and like two weeks later after you've given up on them suddenly there is all this pining and longing and brief bouts of frantic sex. The last 50% was a very long and drawn out Law and Order episode, more interesting than the pining section but just went on forever! The whole book is about 500 pages, which is I think about 200 too long for the story. I don't think the main characters were quite as flat as some of the other reviews have stated. My criticism is more with the plot, which was so padded that I paged impatiently through even the dramatic bits.