“The Dutch House” is, as a result, one of Ms. Patchett’s most straightforward novels and one of her best, artfully paced, gently ironic, a … A poor Brooklyn kid, Cyril amassed a tidy fortune in suburban Philadelphia investing in real estate, starting in 1946 with the Dutch House, an architectural marvel in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Cyril Conroy, Danny and Maeve’s dad, is a stoic World War II vet. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the monarchy is a constitutional office and is controlled by the Constitution of the Netherlands. A mother who runs away from home, an orphaned sister and brother displaced by a grasping stepmother — bare summary sounds like melodrama, and this plot would devolve into cliche in the hands of a softer, more sentimental novelist. Jump to navigation Jump to search. Like Commonwealth, The Dutch House is a family saga that spans decades. The framework of “The Dutch House” is solid enough. Toward the end of World War II, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy surprises his wife, Elna, with the keys to a mansion in the Elkins Park neighborhood of Philadelphia. Filled with suspense, you may read it quickly to find out what happens, but what happens to Danny and Maeve will stay with you for a very long time. Dutch royal house. https://time.com/5686818/ann-patchett-the-dutch-house-interview orvillzw, General Manager at DAS Dutch Haus Restaurant, responded to this review Responded July 27, 2020 During this new Covid19 era, Das Dutch Haus Restaurant's Owners, Management, and staff is dedicated to the safety of all our customers and employees. They were all actually colonial revival homes, built during the first 40 years of the 20th century, that had gambrel (double-pitched, barn-like) roofs. The Dutch House is the stuff of fairy tales, and Patchett’s plot sounds like a fairy tale as well. Every house that I’ve inspected, listed as a “Dutch Colonial”, has had very little in common with homes built by the Dutch in colonial America. Here at Parnassus, booksellers have passed around an early copy of Ann Patchett’s eighth novel so many times it’s starting to fall apart, which tells you something about how excited we are to hold the real thing in our hands at last. The author of "The Dutch House," Ann Patchett, opened up about the many things that inspired her as she wrote her seventh novel. THE DUTCH HOUSE is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. The Dutch House, which follows one fractured family over several decades as the years pile on both joy and heartbreak, is a … "I’m just grateful that people will … Like The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer or Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach, this is a deeply pleasurable book about a big house and the family that lives in it.