Rating: 
Summary: Good but a little unsatisfying
Review: This is the story of Miss Stella Brentwood, a recently retired, successful anthropologist who suddenly realizes that she is old and lacks any strong connections after a life lived all over the world, and attempts to put down roots for the first time by buying a cottage in the English countryside, but has trouble shaking her habitual scientific detachment and continues to observe her own countrymen as if they were a kind of exotic tribe. (The "spiderweb" of the title refers to Stella's perception of the ties that bind people to one another, which she has always managed to avoid.) The book was funny, quite moving, and well written.In my view, the subplot of the violently troubled family down the lane repeatedly threatened to upstage the rather more tame, domestic, and meditative central narrative, though it did provide a welcome dose of suspense, and was very dramatic and disturbing in its own right--perhaps worthy of a book in itself. Ms. Lively has a wonderful eye for detail and is obviously in control of her prose style, and her cross-cutting of different timelines as Stella reviews her past was in the end very effective. I agree, however, with the reviewer below who felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt. I, too, kept flipping pages at the end, looking for the rest of the book. I was left feeling an almost painful lack of closure with Stella's character, which was disappointing because up until that point I felt I'd come to know her quite intimately. All in all a very good, but not a great, novel.
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