A VOCABULARY BOOK REVIEW OF The Unraveling of Julia

The Unraveling of Julia by Lisa Scottoline tells the tale of a young widow who inherits a Tuscan villa and vineyard, plus a load of money. And a lot goes wrong in Scottoline’s psychological thriller style for Julia Pritzker. The mysterious inheritance forces her to face the world again after her husband is murdered in a mugging. Julia struggles with the idea of not knowing why she was named in the will. She does her own investigating and tries to find a possible link to her biological family as well. But once she gets to the villa, a lot of weird stuff happens, and she begins to question her sanity and even worry for her life.

The Unraveling of Julia is full of rich detail of the Tuscan hills where most of the story takes place.

In this blog I offer a different type of book review­—one that’s combined with vocabulary building or sometimes just a fun look at words.

From Scottoline’s thriller, I chose a phrase when that pulled me out of the story just because I have always misunderstood it and likely have never seen it spelled out before. I thought the phrase was “on tenderhooks” and didn’t know where it came from, but got the meaning, sort of. I had to look it up when I saw “on tenterhooks” in The Unraveling of Julia. And then I had to laugh at myself.

From The Unraveling of Julia: 

“Julia felt on tenterhooks about whether they’d succeed, and her worries about Gianluca gnawed at the back of her mind all day, too.”

“On tenterhooks” is a phrase that, per Merriam-Webster online, refers to “waiting nervously for something to happen.” The word tenter means “a frame used for drying and stretching cloth” and is related to tent, so being “on tenterhooks” compares the tenseness of the stretched fabric to the tension of nervous waiting.

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“The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.