Word: freeman
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...Freeman brings freshness and wit to what is essentially a literary cliche: the world microcosm, the great passions of the large war replicated on a smaller scale, not among nations, but among a small group of individuals. In the beginning there is peace and a rustic scene of a small girls' school preparing for a charity Easter egg hunt. This Easter peace is broken when one of the young students at the school is discovered to be missing...
...Gillian Freeman, who is quite literate, is a writer in the Austen tradition. With its gothic surprise ending and all, the plot of An Easter Egg Hunt could be summarized in a couple of lines. Yet Freeman does more than merely tell a story. She re-creates an era. The story is set in the famed English countryside, during World War I. The Great War intrudes on the narrative no more than it intrudes on the small girls' school in which the action transpires. Tightened food supplies and army cadets training nearby are the only evidence in the girls' little...
...reader concerned only with plot, the yield is relatively low. The pastoral is an ancient tradition. Small schools for the young daughters of the leisure classes have had more literary attention, certainly, than their numbers have called for. Freeman has missed no gothic twists here--ghost sightings, illicit trysts, sensual foreigners, even secret abortions...
...like the Easter eggs she writes about, Freeman's tale is delicately and colorfully sketched. From afar, it is a bright and cheerful scene. Poor closely, however, and you begin to see the delicate flaws of the picture. Only then can you see the missed brush strokes and splotches splenty hidden in this pastoral scene...
Screenplay by Deric Washburn, Walon Green and David Freeman...