"Vinegar Girl" by Anne Tyler

    This is a charming short novel--set where?--in the leafy streets of Baltimore, of course, close to Johns Hopkins, where--in a lab that seems to have been forgotten by the university--Louis Battista, an expert on auto-immunity, is working on his research with cages full of mice and his research assistant, a Russian called Pyotr, whose visa is close to running out.
    At home--with a rather strained back-story--Battista' twenty-nine year old daughter, Kate, keeps house for him and her teenage sister, Bunny. After giving birth to Kate, her mother lapsed into on-and- off depression for some fourteen years, when a new drug cheered her up sufficiently to have another child. But not long after, the drug created a heart condition from which she died. After some years with a live-in housekeeper and child-minder,  Kate dropped out of college and took over the running of the household.
     The novel is written from the point of view of Kate. She is the Vinegar Girl, the Shrew, an assistant at a nursery school, who speaks her mind frankly and undiplomatically and rarely sets out to please. In order to provide Pyotr with a visa, Battista proposes that Kate should marry him--not a real marriage, but just one to get Pyotr a green card. Nevertheless, much has to be done to be able to assure the immigration authorities that the marriage is genuinely based on love and affection, and is intended to last. After initially scorning the idea, Kate agrees to go along with it, but continues to keep Pyotr at arms length. Battista envisages Pyotr and Kate living in the family house, where Kate would continue to be the housekeeper. But Pyotr is insistent that she come to live with him--not to share a bed but to live together as friends, and Kate sees this as a way of breaking away from her unsatisfactory life as a housekeeper for her father and maybe starting a new life--back to school to study biology, perhaps.
    This novel is one in a series, commissioned by a publisher whose name I forget, that modernize Shakespeare's plays. And since you know already that the novel is bound to end with "Kiss me, Katya,"
you are not really on tenterhooks as to what will happen. It does--but getting there is a lot of fun, and Anne Tyler's strengths as a novelist of the domestic scene keeps the story bubbling along until the final kiss. The shrew is tamed.