Jess Foley

This novel is set in a village in the UK in the middle of the 19th century. 12-year-old Abbie has just left school and is about to apply for a 'service' job. A picture is drawn of a fairly close lower middle-class family with a discontented mother. When their mother leaves home it’s no surprise, despite being shocking for the era. Abbie has to take charge of the household, and does it well.

The narrative skips several years, when a pleasant day out turns into a nightmare. The rest of the book feels like a kind of soap: it’s full of violence, tragedy, betrayal, and the loss of more and more loved ones. There are some pleasant interludes, then yet another terrible scene is introduced. By the time I was about half-way through I wanted to get to the end, to be finished with all the tragedies, piled higher and higher.

Conversations are stilted, with exchanges that add nothing to the story or the characters concerned. There’s a lot of introspection too, but viewpoints switch even within a scene, making the reader feel uninvolved in any of the characters. Moreover, Abbie becomes less and less likeable, and she's the main protagonist. Rather than being depressed by all the awful things around her, she becomes obsessed, rude and unreasonable. She's supposed to be intelligent, but can't even figure out what a recurring bad dream means.

The ending is, in a sense, hopeful; but Abbie's emotional state isn’t real, and didn’t move me. I should have been in tears at the horrors of the final chapters, but she felt wooden and unbelievable - more and more, I wondered if the author had any insight at all into the ways a young mother's mind worked... and, after finishing, discovered that the author is in fact male, writing under a pseudonym. I don't wish to be sexist, but it does explain, perhaps, why the women in the book are so hard and two-dimensional.

Not recommended.… (more)