I simply cannot finish reading this patronising, overwrought, smarmy (yes, smarmy) bit of prose by a writer I wanted so much to like and admire. I kept going back to it, giving it a fifteenth or sixteenth chance, only to abandon it quickly, in favor of truly brilliant Penelope Lively or even merely skilled Rosamunde Pilcher (other mature, contemporary British female novelists).

The dialogue in the Camomile Lawn is nearly always unrealistic, the characters cartoonish, and the atmosphere / setting overly fussed over. In prewar Britain, the embarassingly good, upper class protagonists go on and on about their simpathy with the Jews (so politically correct now, simply not such an important part of upper crust 1930's Anglo Saxon sensibility), the sexy lovers dish out measured amounts of sauce and swear words... it's just an embarassing mess of an attempt to be raw and real.

I never got past the first hundred pages, and I will not seek out Wesley's other works. I really wasted my time, rolling around in a little bit more than just camomile blossoms.

In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, five cousins come to spend the summer holidays with their uncle and aunt in Cornwall. (The title refers to the lawn in front of the house, which later becomes a symbol of their carefree pre-war youth). The novel then follows the changing fortunes of these five, of their Uncle Richard and Aunt Helena, of Max and Monika, an Austrian Jewish refugee couple, of the local Rector and his wife and of their twin sons, through the war. Intercut with the wartime scenes are scenes set in the 1980s, at Max's funeral, when his surviving friends and acquaintances meet to reveal what has happened to them during the intervening years.

The above synopsis might suggest that this is a lengthy novel; in fact, it is quite a short one (in my edition only 330 pages), and in my view it is the shortness of the novel which is its major problem. Miss Wesley has set herself the task of telling the stories of a large group of people, but has not allowed herself adequate space in which to perform that task. As a result, the complex story is told in insufficient detail, which means that the characters fail to come alive.

The major theme of the novel is the challenge posed to conventional ideas of morality by the changed conditions of wartime. (Most of the characters either form adulterous liaisons or indulge in casual promiscuity). This theme could have been an interesting one, but unfortunately the characters are under-developed and lack any sense of an inner life. It is therefore difficult to understand their motivation or the reasons for their behaviour, and the oportunity to develop this major theme is lost. Most of the main characters, in fact, simply come across as self-centred and lacking in feeling. Even those described as being in love are frequently unfaithful to each other. This would not matter if Miss Wesley's aim had been to create a portrait of a cold, selfish group of people, but I was left with the strong impression that she wanted to make many of them sympathetic or attractively unconventional and failed to do so. This is not a book I could recommend.

I noticed a few factual errors in the book. I will not go through them all, but I must say that, contrary to what Miss Wesley states, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler was not "very pro-Hitler".

I found this to be a delightful story ,set firstly in just pre-war England,about a group of cousins and how they interact with each other as the war begins. I wonder if the sexual licenses taken were really a reflection of how young people felt at that time--live for all your worth today for tomorrow we'll probably be dead-- or would it have happened an any case.You really come to grips with these characters as the book is written by a woman in her 70's who HAS lived and obviously knows what she's writing about. Great read and I'll be looking for more by Mary Wesley--a woman after ny own heart.

There must be some kind of curse with books on objects and persistence. After being deceived with some book by Sessions some years ago, now I got seriously disappointed with this one. This 300-page book suffers from the "big wait" syndrome: it introduces the major topics again and again, each time maybe being a little more specific in some areas, but does not delve into central stuff until 80 pages have happened. That is reinforced by a broken rythm and too short sections that end when they are leaving introductory stuff and starting to turn interesting.

Also, it contains a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Naming conventions are awful or absent, both from the syntactical and semantical viewpoint; see code in p. 68 for a specially relevant example. A book with so much printed code should pay attention to this. Also, some concepts are plain wrong: tables using foreign keys pointing to other tables are not "joined" but linked or related (p. 51). Joining may come later through specific SQL queries using the JOIN keyword. Classes related to other classes don't necessarily result in objects "containing" other objects (p. 52), but referencing them.

Most central to the book, the author claims that IM resolvers solve the problem of making library classes of which we don't have the source code persistent. What about privately held state? You cannot solve this problem as an afterthought without a good metainformation-based reflection infrastructure such as that of .NET, for instance. I don't think the Scoop architecture is much better than any other way to make objects persistent.

Also, attributes are usually considered scalar properties of classes, but the author omits the "relation" or "reference" concept and uses "attribute" to mean any property of a class (p. 58, p. 71). Later, he discusses the issue (p. 176) but the conclussion he draws contradicts his previous use of the concept!

Overall, the book shows a lack of sound conceptualization of object-oriented ideas, and is too geared to the pure programming of persistent objects from a clearly narrow perspective. The author ignores high-level persistent libraries (such as ADO in the Windows platform) and puts too much importance in C++, which definitely is not the most used language in database environments. For instance, the identifier of an object is not the memory address it occupies. That's just a not so convenient way to build object ids. The author builds on top of this by saying that an untrained programmer could start using Visual Basic in a few days; of course, my 3-year old daughter could also start moving pieces on the chessboard right now. But that does not mean she plays chess!
Also, I totally disagree with his proposed parallelism between databases and user interfaces. His viewpoint only can be defended if you consider purely _structural_ UIs such those generated by (bad) 4GLs and some ERP parameterizable environments. Complex application domains (are there simple ones?) require highly _functional_ UIs that do not map the database in any sense.

I feel deceived about this book. I spent my money in a work edited by Addison-Wesley, which is a reputated firm from which I have read dozens of brilliant books, and this one does not keep the minimum level. The book cover shows the names of Mary Loomis and the Three Amigos, which undoubtedly endorse the book's value. What's their value?

Adapting the particular solution for non C++ languages is difficult.

The use of operator overloading in this book only obscures and does not illuminate.

I completely disagree with his "DataExplorer" GUI classes.

On the plus side there are a few good ideas to be mined.

Near the beginning of the book, the author acknowledges two facts. First, much of the database development being done today is using RAD techniques with little formal design discipline. Second, object-orientation is a philosophy, not necessarily connected to the tool you use. Just because you are using C++ doesn't mean you are OO, and similarly you can use OO principles to improve the architecture of programs written using languages that aren't traditionally considered object-oriented. Unfortunately, if you aren't a C++ programmer, you won't get as much out of this book as you could. Chapters 1-4, 13 and 14 are brilliant. These chapters describe the mismatch between object architectures and relational databases and they lay out a philosophy that can be used to develop a solution. The middle chapters, where the author describes his particular solution to the problem (the Scoop architecture), are not nearly as helpful. As a Visual Basic developer who reads a lot about object-oriented programming, I am used to having to adapt what I read to fit within the limits of my chosen language. It isn't usually as much of a struggle as it was with chapters 5-12. I found two problems. First of all, where many authors would use examples to illustrate concepts from the text, this author seems to believe that his examples speak for themselves. The text is little more than filler between code segments. As I said, I am not unfamiliar with C++ examples, but the ones in this book are a chore. I had so much difficulty deciphering what they were doing, that whatever message they were intended to communicate was lost. Second, the examples are so dependent on C++ features like inheritance and operator overloading that they were utterly useless for me. Not to mention their dependence on a particular third-party SQL library (Dbtools.h++). It will be easier to find my own solution than to adapt his. Perhaps a C++ programmer would be able to use the examples in production code, but I would have been better served by higher level, more philosophical examples. UML diagrams that did little more than describe what functionality goes where would have been perfect. So in summary, I guess I still recommend this book to any programmer wrestling with how to apply object oriented techniques to database programming. You'll gain a clearer understanding of the problem and the choices you will be forced to make. Just ignore the author when he tells you that he has solved these problems for you.