Book Review: Vinegar Girl

Bought at the Strand for $10. I've read almost all of Anne Tyler's books and this one was as warm and charming as any of them. Tyler's novels are comforting portraits of eccentric families struggling to get along and living through everyday moments. This is an updated, gentler version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Tyler avoids the Bard's sexist extremes and focuses on the quiet, quirky blossoming of romance between Kate, an aloof pre-school teacher, and Pyotr, her father's lab assistant whom she is marrying so he can get a Green Card. This Kate is not the vile-tempered virago of the play and Pyotr is not the savage domineering Petruchio who starves and whips his shrew into submission. Tyler's Kate is a drifting, prickly loner with no life plan. Her absent-minded scientist dad got the job for her and she reluctantly agrees to his scheme with Pyotr because she has nothing better to do with her life. Pyotr is an orphaned Eastern Europe emigre with no family seeking a place in a foreign land. He is stubborn like Kate and their unlikely dance into matrimony is sweetly rendered. I liked the scene where Kate fixes herself a meal with the odds and ends in Pyotr's refrigerator. The details are so vivid it makes preparing an egg salad into a major event in her life as she accepts her new role.