The Safekeep
A fastidious Dutch woman's ordered life is disrupted by a visiting woman and a growing awareness of what her family's possessions actually are. Van der Wouden's debut is a taut, slow-burning story of suspicion and desire in a postwar Dutch house, told through the accumulation of domestic detail.
Isabel and Eva move from open hostility to obsession fast, and a cluster of readers say the turn is never quite earned: Eva especially stays thin or “wishy-washy” on the page for readers who wanted more from her before the desire arrived. The historical revelation the second half is built around gets signposted early enough that several readers saw it coming, one saying flatly “the twist was obvious well before it was revealed.” Others push back on the marketing itself, sold with “the pacing and twists of a thriller” against a book that spends its first half on domestic routine and paranoia over missing spoons. At least one reader calls the pacing itself the real problem: “extremely slow and much longer than 272 pages.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
