"This too shall pass"... except some things don't, do they. Blanca herself admits this: she's a middle-aged woman and her mother has just died, and for the rest of her life she'll be motherless. That's hard for her to encompass, in the midst of recent and profound grief, and so Blanca packs up her family and various hangers-on and goes to spend time in a holiday town, in order to try and get over the worst of it. 

It's a lot more lighthearted than it sounds, without actually undermining that state of grief. It helps that Blanca is not always sympathetic. She has a painfully clear-eyed view of life, albeit with some blind spots where she herself is concerned, and her take-no-bullshit attitude, punctuated by bouts of indolent sex with both an ex-husband, and with someone else's current husband, is partly a coping mechanism, and partly, I think, a result of a latent self-centredness. But that's not the right word, exactly. It's enjoyment of life as a survival mechanism, I think, and there's a sunshiny gloss over all of this, like one of those find-yourself Mediterranean stories that are just this side of syrupy, the modern fairy tale for women past the age of princesses. And like those stories, it's a very easy book to swallow, with lovely evocative prose... but my lasting impression is of the gloss, rather than the grief.