Romantic fiction is Not My Thing. And, superficially, this novel pressed all of my negative buttons: soft-focus cover art. Swooning blurbs. Seal of approval from the Richard and July Book club. (It is literally a little gold seal. Richard and Judy are the married co-hosts of a British morning TV show. Now you understand my qualms.) But ... duty calls, this was this month's selection for our village book group.
And how very, very, wrong I was. This is a genuine Good Read: McMahon's plotting heaps personal and professional trouble on her heroine, Evelyn, right from Page 1. Her efforts on behalf of her clients in two cases provide strong narrative scaffolding for her personal dilemma -- how to react to the woman who has turned up on the family doorstep, claiming that her son is the child of Evelyn's brother, who died in the trenches toward the end of the war. The different threads of the story suggest the varying ways that families can support each other, can let each other down, and bring out the best and the worst in each other.
McMahon also demonstrates a very sure touch with her historical material. She wears her research (clothes, food, music, politics) lightly, but she makes the most of her context -- the decade following the war that, in the UK, is still referred to as The Great War, a period in which the survivors (both military and civilian) had to emerge from the nightmare of the war years, and create a "new normal." Again the plot threads do a great job of demonstrating the after-effects of the War: broken families, men crippled in mind and body, women with little or no prospect of finding someone to create of family of their own.
Great stuff for a wet weekend!!
And how very, very, wrong I was. This is a genuine Good Read: McMahon's plotting heaps personal and professional trouble on her heroine, Evelyn, right from Page 1. Her efforts on behalf of her clients in two cases provide strong narrative scaffolding for her personal dilemma -- how to react to the woman who has turned up on the family doorstep, claiming that her son is the child of Evelyn's brother, who died in the trenches toward the end of the war. The different threads of the story suggest the varying ways that families can support each other, can let each other down, and bring out the best and the worst in each other.
McMahon also demonstrates a very sure touch with her historical material. She wears her research (clothes, food, music, politics) lightly, but she makes the most of her context -- the decade following the war that, in the UK, is still referred to as The Great War, a period in which the survivors (both military and civilian) had to emerge from the nightmare of the war years, and create a "new normal." Again the plot threads do a great job of demonstrating the after-effects of the War: broken families, men crippled in mind and body, women with little or no prospect of finding someone to create of family of their own.
Great stuff for a wet weekend!!
