Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr

Jean Kerr, an Irish-American author and playwright, was famous for several plays, books, and several musicals. (I’ve seen him hit as many as five, but that’s championship stuff and he can’t do it every time.)” -Please Don’t Eat the Daisies On the other hand, he is unable to get from the living room into the front hall without bumping into at least two pieces of furniture. With a garden rake in one hand he scampers up a tree, out across a long branch, and down over the stone wall – as graceful and deft as a squirrel.

Because they are impossible, that’s why…You take Christopher – and you may he’s a slightly used eight-year-old… I watch him from the kitchen window. I realise I’ve been very brief about Please Don’t Eat The Daisies, but, to be honest, I’m pretty sure you’ll know whether or not you’ll want to read this based on the title and concept alone… (Oh, and bear in mind, when you read the word ‘pants’, that this is an American book.“We are being very careful with our children.They’ll never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. Oh, I forgot, there was one piece which slid onto a very different topic – ‘Touours tristesse’ was a rather amusing pastiche of Francoise Sagan. It was turned into a 1960 film with Doris Day, and later a TV series with Pat Crowley, although I can’t imagine how. This sort of thing: ‘You take Christopher – and you may he’s a slightly used eight-year-old.’ That is more or less what I was looking for, of course, and she is rather brilliant on that one-note – it’s just not going to enter my pantheon of greats. Although all three authors were initially serialised, it’s most obvious with Kerr – and her book is really one-note: the exasperated wife and mother. It isn’t as good as Delafield or Jackson, in my opinion – perhaps because there is less attempt at an overall structure. Delafield’s Provincial Lady will always be the doyenne, and so read Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat The Daisies (1957). She might well be very famous, but I’d not heard of her before… but I was looking for more in that amusing-tales-of-wife-and-motherhood line, of which E.M.

But I did find another name mentioned alongside hers once or twice – and that was Jean Kerr. After I read Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, I went on a little Google spree to see what others had said about it.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr