The Love Child by Rachel Hore is not just an adoption story of birth mother and daughter, it is a story of women’s lives between the wars when shame and public expectation, not love, governed family decisions. 
In 1917 Alice Copeman, a 19-year old nurse, falls in love with a soldier home on leave. They expect to marry but he is killed. No one else knows of their relationship, it is wartime and everything happened so quickly. But Alice is pregnant.
Mourning for Jack, Alice is forced by her father and stepmother to give the child up for adoption. In the Essex seaside town of Farthingsea, Edith and Philip Burns long for their own child. When they adopt a baby girl Irene, they expect their family to be happily complete. But Irene feels different from her parents and grows frustrated at the lies told about her birth; in particular she struggles to connect with her mother Edith and often feels rejected. At school she is bullied. At home she feels second rate to her younger brother, conceived by Edith and Philip after they adopted Irene. Things improve for Irene when she makes friends with a boy from the disreputable artistic part of town; Tom lives with his single mother and he too is different. Both Tom and his mother are positive influences on Irene.
This is a story told in two strands – Alice and Irene – first as each makes her own way in the world, and then as their paths come closer together. Alice’s story – qualifying as a doctor and working as a GP – is fascinating and a glimpse of a time when female doctors were starting to appear. Irene is also independent, leaving Farthingsea to work in London at an art gallery. In these inter-war years it was still difficult for independent women to make their own way. Old-fashioned standards and expectations prove a challenge for both Alice and for Irene and often at the hands of other women.
A little slow to start, not helped as the storyline jumps around from year to year, it settled down halfway through. At times I confused Irene’s adoptive mother Edith with Alice’s stepmother Gwen, both are sharp-edged women whose words can wound.
This is a novel of love, separation, shame and mother and daughter dynamics; it ultimately shows how the road to love can take many diversions and twists along the way. Both Alice and Irene are rather self-contained and defensive, afraid of being hurt, but they are also capable of being loved if they allow their self-protection to drop. This is a reflective and sensitive portrayal of the adoption dilemma when the hunger of one individual for the truth may cause pain to others.
A note about the cover; I could see no link between the story and a rowing boat at sunset.
Click the title to read my reviews of two other books by Rachel Hore:-
A BEAUTIFUL SPY
A WEEK IN PARIS
ONE MOONLIT NIGHT
THE HIDDEN YEARS
If you like this, try:-
‘The Collaborator’s Daughter’ by Eva Glyn
‘The Last Day’ by Claire Dyer
‘The House on the Shore’ by Victoria Howard
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LOVE CHILD by Rachel Hore @Rachelhore https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4xa via @SandraDanby
When Gemma Lawrence inherits a share of her Great Aunt’s restaurant she is dismayed to find she has to share it with Stefano Andrea, a moody Italian chef. Gemma and Stefano have broken relationships behind them and dislike each other on sight as much as Stefano hates the cold English weather. Under the terms of the will, they have to work together for six months to turn the dilapidated building into a successful restaurant. If either of them leaves or a profit has not been made, then they will lose their inheritance. The challenge is on and neither of them are prepared to give up. As they work together they begin to unravel the story behind the inheritance and find out what links the English apple orchard to the Italian lemon grove. Apple Orchard, Lemon Grove is a fast-paced novel with intriguing characters, atmospheric locations and mouth-watering food.
What is a ‘Porridge & Cream’ book? It’s the book you turn to when you need a familiar read, when you are tired, ill, or out-of-sorts, where you know the story and love it. Where reading it is like slipping on your oldest, scruffiest slippers after walking for miles. Where does the name ‘Porridge & Cream’ come from? Cat Deerborn is a character in Susan Hill’s ‘Simon Serrailler’ detective series. Cat is a hard-worked GP, a widow with two children and she struggles from day-to-day. One night, after a particularly difficult day, she needs something familiar to read. From her bookshelf she selects 
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