Tag Archives: book review

#BookReview ‘The Escape’ by CL Taylor @callytaylor #thriller

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The Escape by CL Taylor fairly gallops along without time to take a deep breath. It is a tale of escape, pursuit, lies, vulnerability, long-hidden secrets and selfishness. At times I didn’t know which character to believe and I didn’t particularly like any of them. I wanted to sit them down at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits, and bang their heads together. There appear to be so many lies it is difficult to sift out the truth, which became a little frustrating after a while. In the end, there are many types of escape. CL TaylorJo and Max have a toddler daughter Elise. Max, an investigative journalist, has just completed a long-running story which resulted in a conviction, and he is jubilant. Jo, who became agoraphobic after the loss of their first child Henry, lives from day to day, her small world surrounding Elise. Jo feels Max is less sympathetic to her condition than he used to be. Max tries to be patient but is finding it increasingly difficult. Into this fragile world steps Paula, a stranger, who threatens Jo and Elise. The first crack appears as Max doubts Jo’s judgement of the threat. Is she panicking again, exaggerating it, imagining it?
Faced with danger to her child, Jo runs. That is the escape of the title. The agoraphobia which made it a trial to take her daughter to nursery every day fades as, driven by her maternal defence mechanism, she packs Elise into her car and flees to Ireland. Ireland, we know vaguely, is where her mother came from years ago but of which she will not speak. More mystery. As she runs, Jo appears more unbalanced, sees threats on all sides and is forever planning escape routes. But where is the danger actually coming from? Is she seeing clearly, could it be that some of the lies which frighten her are actually the truth? And vice-versa. Is she a reliable witness? The need for flight seems to over-ride all historic connections of love and trust, she runs from the people who try to help her. So, is she misguided, confused? Or correct? And in escaping with Elise, in all good intentions to protect her daughter, is she putting her two-year-old daughter in further danger of her life?
This is a psychological thriller which asks some difficult questions. About how we react to stress, how our judgement of others can be influenced, and when to trust your own deep-seated instincts.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers by CL Taylor:-
THE ACCIDENT
THE LIE

If you like this, try:-
‘One Step Too Far’ by Tina Seskis
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone
‘The Last of Us’ by Rob Ewing

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#BookReview THE ESCAPE by CL Taylor @callytaylor http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Tj via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Girl in Trouble’ by Rhoda Baxter @RhodaBaxter #romance

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Funny, sad and believable: Girl in Trouble by Rhoda Baxter is the third in her Smart Girls series and, though some of the characters have cameo appearances throughout the series, can be read alone. Which is what I did, quickly, particularly enjoying the second half of the story. I was worried that the first chapter, in which we meet Olivia at a stag night, meant the book would be too chick lit for me but as the story progresses the themes become darker and complex. Rhoda BaxterOlivia is thirty, relationship-phobic and surrounded by friends. She is quite independent, thank you very much and does not need a man to look after her. She has never been in love, never allowed herself to be in love and knows this dislike/distrust of men can be traced back to her father who left her and her mother when she was a child. She also has a health issue that makes pregnancy a big risk, though to be honest I was a little in the dark about the specifics of this. Instead she is a serial one-night girlfriend. When she falls accidentally pregnant, Olivia thinks the decision to have an abortion is straightforward and sensible. Of course life gets in the way, in two ways. Firstly her absent landlord Walter, who lives in the upstairs flat, returns home and is hot and funny and makes her feel comfortable in a cosy sexy way; a first for Olivia. And then her absent father arrives on her doorstep.
This is a fast-paced well-written novel which runs the gamut of emotions from chuckles to tears to pain. Relationships within broken families, as the years pass, are not simple and Baxter explores the unresolved tension and anger of Olivia and her mother Liz towards her father Trevor. Graham, her stepfather, has been a calm and loving influence on Olivia since her teens, but she only starts to appreciate this once Trevor returns to the scene. The father/daughter theme is echoed also in Walter’s storyline. His divorced wife Charlotte is to remarry and take their daughter, Emily, to live in America. Walter, absent because of work through many of Emily’s baby years, realises what he has missed just as he is about to lose it.
If you like your girls to be girly then Olivia does not fit that profile. She keeps her thoughts to herself and is quite complex in her behaviour. She does not want children and, in discussions with her friend Ruchi, the for/against options for abortion are explored with Ruchi, at first, unhappy at her friend’s viewpoint. So although the cover design is bright and cheerful, Girl in Trouble touches on some serious topics in a balanced and thoughtful manner. I would have liked to know more about Olivia’s work life as a solicitor though, in fact Walter’s career as a marine biologist is explained in much more detail.
If you’re going on holiday, or a long train journey, you will devour this.

Read my review of PLEASE RELEASE ME, also by Rhoda Baxter.

If you like this, try:-
‘Butterfly Barn’ by Karen Power
‘One Step Too Far’ by Tina Seskis
‘Stormy Summer’ by Suzy Turner

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GIRL IN TROUBLE by Rhoda Baxter @RhodaBaxter http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Wf via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Travelers’ by Chris Pavone #thriller

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What a non-stop ride this is. I resented everything which made me put this book down. The Travelers by Chris Pavone is a spy thriller about an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job who finds himself in an extraordinary position. It reminded me a little of Robert Redford in the film Three Days of the Condor. Chris PavoneTravel writer Will works for New York-based Travelers, a luxury travel magazine. Married to Chloe, who works as a freelance for the same magazine, they live in a rundown money-pit in Brooklyn. Things change in a short space of time. On a press trip in France, Will flirts outrageously with an Australian journalist and goes home, relieved he didn’t succumb to temptation. But on his next press trip to the wine area of Argentina, Elle is there again and this time they do have sex. Except Elle isn’t what she says she is, her name isn’t Elle and she isn’t Australian. She gives Will a choice. Cooperate, supply information about his contacts and people he writes about, or else he will be exposed to his boss Malcolm and to Chloe. And so he cooperates.
The action is rapid. Some sections – identified only by the location, not the person – are only half a page and for the first third of the book this is disorientating. I couldn’t work out who was spying and who was being spied upon. A man in an office sits at a computer terminal and monitors targets, the flights they take, the hotels and rental cars they book. An un-named woman goes to Capri to kill a man. An American man wants to disappear. Malcolm has a hidden office with secret files.
The threads are tangled thoroughly. The answer is not one I predicted. It is impossible to explain the plot without giving away secrets, but the ending in Iceland will make a great action sequence in a film.

And here’s my review of another thriller by Chris Pavone:-
THE ACCIDENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black
‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE TRAVELERS by Chris Pavone via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2lT

#BookReview ‘Autumn’ by Ali Smith #SeasonalQuartet #contemporary

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Uplifting, enlightening, funny, clever, depressing, sad and heartwarming. The mischievous Autumn by Ali Smith is an ingenious novel, the first of the ‘Seasonal Quartet’ telling the story of the UK fragmented after the post-Brexit vote in 2016, when ugliness and prejudice rose to the surface setting brother against sister, friend against friend, dividing streets, neighbourhoods and towns, a binary split with each side convinced it is right and the other, wrong. Ali SmithDaniel Gluck is 101 years old and in a nursing home, we see from his wonderful lyrical dreams that he teeters on the edge of death. Smith builds her world around Mr Gluck and Elisabeth Demand who, with her mother Wendy, lived next door to Daniel when Elisabeth was a child. Their relationship starts in 1993. Elisabeth, aged eight, must interview a neighbour for a homework project. Her mother is not keen and tries to bribe her to invent a neighbour instead. The following day Elisabeth meets Mr Gluck and, despite her mother’s misgivings (single man, dodgy, must be gay, might be unsafe etc) they become firm friends. Now he is 101 and she tells a lie to the nursing home – yes, she is his grand-daughter – in order to gain a visitor’s pass. She sits by his bed and reads Brave New World.
Smith compares and contrasts modern life with past times in the twentieth-century, we see modern life through Elisabeth’s storyline countered by Daniel’s memories and dreams, and his interpretations of books, art and song for the child Elisabeth. The story wings its way through contemporary references from television antiques programmes and passport applications to celebrity Christine Keeler, sculptor Barbara Hepworth and pop artist Pauline Boty.
This is all very interesting but, with the lightest of hands, Smith gives a warning about the danger of nationalism, populism and the easy appeal of accepting political lies rather than asking difficult questions of the politicians and ourselves. One passage in particular underlines it all: Daniel’s younger sister Hannah is captured in Nice, France, in 1943 despite carrying papers which identify her as Adrienne Albert.
Running throughout are the themes of truth v lies [juxtaposed often, with lies often being throwaway and easy whilst truth can be awkward and difficult to say] and identity. There is a hilarious passage where Elisabeth tries to renew her passport application at the Post Office, an all-too-believable portrayal of officialdom. Some of the historical sections, particularly about Keeler and Boty, seemed rushed and I would have liked more of Daniel’s songwriting background which was mentioned fleetingly.
Short, at 272 pages, Autumn can be read in one sitting. It is a joy to read. Next in the quartet comes Winter.
Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize.

Click the title to read my reviews of other books by Ali Smith:-
WINTER #2SeasonalQuartet
SPRING #3SeasonalQuartet
SUMMER #4SeasonalQuartet
COMPANION PIECE #5SeasonalQuartet
HOW TO BE BOTH

If you like this, try:-
‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively
‘Darktown’ by Thomas Mullen
‘Shelter’ by Sarah Franklin

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#BookReview ‘After Leaving Mr Mackenzie’ by Jean Rhys #historicalfiction

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A slim novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is the second novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1931. Semi-autobiographical, it tells the story of a young woman [if a woman in her mid-thirties can be called young] who faces up to the realities of life after a love affair ends. The title is not strictly true because Julia did not leave Mr Mackenzie, he left her. Jean Rhys She moves to a cheap hotel room where the furnishings are faded and the only decoration is a poor painting which she assumes must have been left in lieu of debt by a previous tenant. Where Rhys excels is her description of the small details, drawing a picture of Julia’s surroundings and her moods. ‘She found pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done. Her mind was a confusion of memory and imagination. It was always places that she thought of, not people. She would like thinking of the dark shadows of houses in a street white with sunshine; or of trees with slender black branches and young green leaves, like the trees of a London square in spring; or of a dark-purple sea, the sea of a chromo or of some tropical country that she had never seen.’ Like the title of the novel, it is not always clear what is true and what is imagination.
After the death of her baby and the breakdown of her marriage, which is not really explained, Julia survives in Paris thanks to the men she dates. They give her cash, buy her clothes, pay for her lodging; in this, Julia is similar to Marya in Rhys’ first novel Quartet. This novel takes a step further in that when her maintenance payments stop, Julia takes action to help her situation. After unsuccessfully asking Mr Mackenzie for cash, she is helped by a stranger, Mr Horsfield. Julia buys new clothes and a train ticket to London where she visits her sister who cares for their dying mother.
This is a study of one woman’s desperate situation and her dependency on others. Julia is a sad woman with a past, shabby, as if wearing a sign around her neck saying ‘trouble’. The delight in reading this book is how Rhys tells Julia’s story, as much as the story itself.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Here’s my review of another novel by Jean Rhys:-
QUARTET

If you like this, try:-
‘Orphans of the Carnival’ by Carol Birch
‘Birdcage Walk’ by Helen Dunmore
‘The Duchess’ by Wendy Holden

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview AFTER LEAVING MR MACKENZIE by Jean Rhys via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2d7 

#BookReview ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald #historical

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If ever there is a book to persevere with, to have patience with, and to go back and re-read again, it is The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. When I bought it, I didn’t realize it was the last novel by the Booker prize winner; published five years before her death in 2000 aged 83. For someone about to read it, it can seem a trifle intimidating. Penelope FitzgeraldSet in 18th century Germany, Fitzgerald tells her imagining of the teenage story of real German poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg, later called Novalis. He is a young man so self-contained, so absorbed in his thoughts, that I wondered where the drama would arise. But it does, because he falls in love.
The Blue Flower is a short novel, 223 pages. The chapters are concise [mostly only two or three pages each] and this encouraged me to ‘just read another’ and so, gradually, almost without realizing, I fell into the story. Fitzgerald recreates this particular time in German history with a delicacy that, despite the language and sometimes confusing names, makes the people become real.
It is 1794 and Fritz, an idealistic and passionate student of philosophy and writer of poems, stays with some family friends and meets their youngest daughter, Sophie von Kühn. Love is instant for Fritz and, despite a little bemusement on the part of Sophie, and astonishment by his siblings and friends, he proves himself constant.
It is the sort of novel that, when you are reading it you ‘get’ it but afterwards, when trying to describe it to someone else, you struggle to grasp it. I still do not really understand the meaning of the blue flower. But although the deeper meaning may elude me, there are passages I love. Particularly the opening chapter when a guest arrives at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse; it is washday, the annual occasion for washing personal and household linen, and his arrival effects an introduction to the household. This starts a juxtaposition which runs throughout the novel, of the ordinary everyday mundanity of life alongside Fritz’s poetic sensibilities. He calls twelve-year old Sophie his Philosophy, his guardian spirit. Knowing he must wait for her, he trains as an official in the salt mines and Fitzgerald treats us to some of the practicalities and science of this industry.
This is not a lazy read. Be prepared to invest something into it yourself. Fitzgerald does not put it all onto the page, she expects the reader to think, to research, to work it out, as she did when writing. If each book is the visible bit of an iceberg above the waterline, with the research submerged, The Blue Flower is the snowball on top of the iceberg.

Read my review of OFFSHORE, also by Penelope Fitzgerald.

If you like this, try this:-
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley
‘Gone are the Leaves’ by Anne Donovan

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald https://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Zr via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Lie of the Land’ by @AmandaPCraig #contemporary

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A simple yet deceptively nuanced story of modern times, The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig is full of the contrasts and comparisons thrown up by ordinary life. The Bredins, Quentin and Lottie, have agreed to divorce after his infidelity but cannot afford to. Unable to sell their London house, they rent it out instead and move to Devon to a dank dark creepy farmhouse where they must manage to live together. Amanda CraigWhat happens over the next year is unexpected and changes all their lives forever. This is a funny, mysterious and sometimes sad story of a city family in the country where, instead of leaving their problems behind, they find they are magnified. There is truth in the old adage, you cannot run from your problems.
What happened to the previous tenant of Home Farm? Who is the mysterious tramp in the local pub? And is Lottie really having an affair with a local architect. Meanwhile, Quentin’s father is dying and his mother is stoically coping. Lottie’s son Xan works in the nearby pie factory where, as well as finding himself a Polish girlfriend, he makes friends with Dawn, the daughter of the Bredin’s cleaner. Dawn, who seems downtrodden, obese and introverted, can play the piano like an angel. Craig has written a character-driven novel with a community of characters to make Devon feel at once cozy and familiar while being secretive and insulated. Where contrasts are expected between urban and rural life, there are often likenesses. There are several sub-plots cleverly woven into the main family narrative, of caring for elderly parents, bullying, childlessness, rural phone and broadband reception, Polish workers and urban snobbishness about country life.
I particularly liked sheep farmer’s wife Sally Verity, whose job as a social worker sees her move around the countryside, cleverly knitting together people and stories. Lottie’s mother Marta, though she stays in London, is another link between generations, locations and storylines. Only when I had finished the book did I learn that some of the characters appear in other novels by Craig, something which did not affect my understanding or enjoyment of the book.

If you like this, try:-
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘My Husband the Stranger’ by Rebecca Done
‘Ghost Moth’ by Michèle Forbes

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#BookReview THE LIE OF THE LAND by @AmandaPCraig http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Pp via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Walworth Beauty’ by Michèle Roberts #historical

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From the first page, I knew this was going to be one of those reads rich in historical scents and sensations, a story to lose yourself in. The Walworth Beauty by Michèle Roberts is set in the London district of Walworth, just south of the River Thames and part of the Borough of Southwark. It tells the story of Joseph Benson in 1851 and Madeleine in 2011, 160 years apart but experiencing so many similar things. Michèle RobertsMadeleine loses her job as a lecturer of English literature, as a result she moves to a garden flat in Apricot Place, Walworth. She is delicately attuned to the history of London, walking its streets and seeing Virginia Woolf walking ahead of her, Hilda Doolittle passing her by, and, in a basement kitchen in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a mistress instructing her new housemaid. Just how closely Madeleine is connected to the past becomes clearer in the second half of the story as she explores Walworth, researching its local history and meeting her new neighbours.
Joseph and his family live in a rented house in Lamb’s Conduit Street. He works for sociologist Henry Mayhew, researching the working conditions and social backgrounds of prostitutes in Walworth. Joshua is a contradictory character, perhaps a man of his time with contemporary attitudes and assumptions about women. Still mourning his idolised first wife Nathalie, he is outwardly respectable but has money problems. He is a spendthrift and betrays Cara his second wife [and Nathalie’s older sister] by visiting prostitutes, viewing it as a necessity so Cara will not conceive again, rather than unfaithfulness. His research takes him to a house in Apricot Place where he meets landlady Mrs Dulcimer, an exotic brown-skinned woman who Joshua mistakes for a madam but who in fact helps struggling young women to establish themselves with jobs and homes.
The theme of classification runs throughout this novel, the formal type of labelling as in Mayhew’s study and the Dewey Decimal labelling system for libraries, but also the informal way of labelling people, pre-judging, jumping to conclusions. Mayhew classifies prostitutes as criminals and it is with this view that Joseph conducts his first research. In meeting Mrs Dulcimer, however, he learns the true stories of struggle and abandonment in the lives of many of the women he labels so easily as whores. He is an unreliable judge of women’s characters, however, even those closest to him.
We see similar classifications in Madeleine’s story in modern-day Walworth. There are themes of grief, longing for what is out of reach, women’s position in society and men’s attitudes towards women and sexuality. Judgements based on class and sex. The two storylines are connected in places by hints of ghosts or presences, which I found a little unsatisfactory. This is a novel about the different parts of society, some isolated, some overlapping like a Venn diagram, and as true today as in Victorian London.
I enjoyed unpicking the connections between 1851 and 2011, handled so delicately that it would be easy to pass them by. Such as Mrs Dulcimer’s missing earring, surrendered as an identifying token at the Foundling Hospital when she handed in her baby, is seen by Madeleine in a display at the Foundling Museum. There are countless examples like this of mirrored details and parallel experiences, connecting Joseph and Mrs Dulcimer with Madeleine.
The Walworth Beauty is one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year and is worth re-reading to absorb the beautiful detail written by a novelist entwined with her story and subject.

Read my review of FAIR EXCHANGE also by Michèle Roberts, and try the #FirstPara HERE

If you like this, try:-
‘Frog Music’ by Emma Donoghue
‘Birdcage Walk’ by Helen Dunmore
‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WALWORTH BEAUTY by Michèle Roberts http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2SQ via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Garden of Evening Mists’ by Tan Twan Eng #Malaya

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This is another enchanting novel by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists focuses on the post-Second World War period in Malaya. Tan Twan EngThe Japanese occupiers have gone and local communist fighters are challenging British rule. In the hills of the Cameron Highlands, next to a tea plantation, lies a delicate Japanese garden created by Nakamura Aritomo, a man who was once gardener to the Emperor of Japan. Decades later when Yun Ling Teoh retires as a Supreme Court judge in Kuala Lumpur, she re-visits the garden at Yugiri. This is her story.
In the 1950s Emergency, the people who lived in Malaya’s hill villages grew to fear the communists. Homes were raided and destroyed, people killed, women raped. This is the setting in which Yun Ling first visits Yugiri to ask Aritomo to build a traditional Japanese garden in memory of her sister Yun Hong. This is a novel about memory, things remembered and things denied, and about loyalty. Yun Ling’s loyalty to her sister who was killed in a Japanese labour camp and her guilt that she could have done more to save her, and loyalty to Arimoto who she loved and thought she knew.
Judge Teoh returns to Yugiri as an old woman approaching death, many years after Arimoto walked into the jungle and never returned. She is forced to relive her past when a historian arrives to assess Arimoto’s engravings. As she relives the years of her imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese, and the post-war years when she first worked at Yugiri’s garden, Judge Teoh questions her perceptions of the past. This time, there is no avoiding the truth.
Tan Twan Eng discusses big issues. He explores the moral dilemmas of war and peace after war, considering the murderous actions of the Japanese at war, the same Japanese who love traditional gardens and the rituals of archery. This novel is rich in history, both of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, the labour camps, lost war treasure, and of the Emergency. The lush countryside is offset by the tales of horror and abuse told. As with Tan Twan Eng’s first novel, The Gift of Rain, the beauty of the setting is juxtaposed with cruelty and violence.
A deep, thought-provoking and at times difficult novel, the writing is beautiful.

Read the first paragraph of THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS.

And here are my reviews of two other novels by Tan Twan Eng:-
THE GIFT OF RAIN  … and try the #FirstPara HERE.
THE HOUSE OF DOORS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Aftermath’ by Rhidian Brook
‘Homeland’ by Clare Francis
‘The Book of Lies’ by Mary Horlock

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS by Tan Twan Eng http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2qf via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Shadow Baby’ by Margaret Forster #adoption

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A slow-build read which, by halfway, Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster had me glued to the page. It is in part a story about unplanned pregnancy – choices, motherhood and how a girl grows to be a mother herself – and part social history. The history is the skeleton on which the flesh of the story hangs and inter-connects. Two young women fall pregnant, Leah in 1887 and Hazel in 1956. Both abandon their babies. Margaret ForsterThis is the story of Leah and her daughter Evie, Hazel and her daughter Shona. The circumstances are different – Evie is brought up first in a children’s home and then by reluctant relatives; Shona is adopted by a family desperate for a child with a mother whose care is suffocating – but the stories so similar. Both daughters are obsessed with their birth mothers.
From generation to generation, mistakes are uncannily mirrored. Attitudes from the 19th century reappear in the 20th. Shadow Baby is a thoughtful and measured exploration of how the nature of being a mother differs from woman to woman, expectations, fears, well-meaning but hurtful family and social pressure. And how, when the daughter grows into a woman who in turn becomes pregnant, the same fears, expectations and social pressures kick in. Forster is perceptive about the rejection felt by the daughters, and the shame of their mothers, shame which prompts denial and continued rejection. These women have to make hard decisions to survive, decisions a million miles away from how we live today in our comfortable 21st century lives but with a stark reminder of how the actions of a previous generation can affect the next.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Letter’ by Kathryn Hughes
‘Innocent Blood’ by PD James
‘Chosen Child’ by Linda Huber

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview SHADOW BABY by Margaret Forster http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2dO via @SandraDanby