There is a Tide

Mame Durrance grew up on a pig farm in Cowbarn, Iowa, with ambitions far larger than any cornfield could contain. When an inheritance from a distant aunt funds her dreams of journalism, she sets sail for New York, and when that proves a bust, she pushes on to London, her credentials boldly declaring her "European Correspondent" for the Cowbarn Independent. England, she discovers, is a nation of cramped villages, tepid tea, and lodgings that would make a barn feel luxurious. Yet nothing dampens her irrepressible American optimism. With a monocle-counting aristocrat, a bemused British journalist, and the entire stuffy establishment of Edwardian England arrayed against her, Mame proceeds to shake things up anyway. John Collis Snaith crafts a sparkling fish-out-of-water comedy that riffs on the absurd collision between brash New World confidence and Old World reserve. It's a furious, funny portrait of a woman who refuses to be small, and a sharp-eyed satire of both American naïveté and British class pretension that still lands more than a century later.