For the next part of my stop on The Love Books Blog Tour for S Reed’s There Goes The Neighbourhood, I present to you this little excerpt from the novel. Enjoy!
Underappreciated
Poppy Field Lane is like any typical American suburb of the 50s… but it’s the mid-90s and the (mostly) terrible fashion notwithstanding, the Lane is a time capsule of life in Upstate New York before the feminist movement. The men go to work, and the women stay home and look after the house. The men have all the fun, and the women clean up afterwards. The men set all the rules, and the women abide by them… except when the men are out of town. None of these rules apply to eccentric widowed billionaire Ignatius Feltrap who is as young as she is rich.
She lived in the biggest house – a mansion, really – the biggest in all of Poppy Field Lane, but one day, she decided she no longer liked her neighbors, so she paid an extortionate amount of money to have her house moved to the beachfront.
Not because she liked the view, but so it would spoil the stunning vistas for her abhorrent neighbors, Carol and Frank, the Lilinsters (there are better names that Ignatius likes to call them by, but none of them are polite). Ignatius is convinced they have risen from the fiery depths of hell just to try and ruin her life; try to, anyway. It also gave her a chance to throw even wilder parties without the worry (not that she did) of a noise complaint from said neighbors. In fact, if it weren’t for them, most of the town wouldn’t mind her. And don’t think she doesn’t take pleasure in their indignation. Carol, especially, lived for calling the cops to Feltrap Manor, although she would never give it that name. She’d usually say something like “That woman, I believe her name is Ignatius, yes, the widow, well, she’s throwing an illegal party again”, and she would purr over the word ‘widow’ and let it hang in the receiver’s ear like a moldy piece of fruit. Ignatius hoped taking that power away from the vile witch would make her melt, but it only seemed to exacerbate the tension between the two of them. To Ignatius’s disdain, Carol and her brusque husband tick on. How she loathes the ground they walk on. If you ask her, the Lilinsters are to blame for her being outcast from the rest of Poppy Field Lane. If it weren’t for them, she would be accepted by the town, despite being ‘new money’. And despite her rambunctious attitude, she does want to be accepted, but she will not conform to the Lane’s outdated ways.
There is an unspoken understanding that they and Ignatius are civil toward each other in the street… However, only one of them got the memo and read it. The other, it seems, set it on fire… with a flamethrower.
Read the rest in There Goes The Neighbourhood by S Reed.
My thanks to Love Books Group for the invitation to participate in this Tour.
