I am a great fan of Dodie Smith's lovely children's book One hundred and one Dalmatians, and have been curious to read something else by her for a long time. This is a completely different novel, but equally good. Cassandra's eccentric father is a writer whose first book took the literary world by storm but he has since failed to write a single word. This tells the story of seventeen-year-old, Cassandra and her extraordinary family of an older sister, an artistic and loving stepmother and the non-writing father, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle English castle in the (possibly) 1930s.