Lizzie and Paul Bradshaw met at university and married when she became pregnant, just before she had completed her degree. Dylan, their baby son is now six months old and they are living in the Lake District, where Paul is doing two part-time jobs, as a National Trust Ranger and working in a bar. However, as they are struggling to make ends meet Lizzie, who wants to be able to complete her dissertation and then take up a provisional place she has been offered to study for a Masters in Environmental Science, decides to take a part-time job in Leeds. This means that she will be separated from Paul and Dylan for half the week but it will be worth it because it will allow her to contribute to the household finances and also to save to finance her future studies. However, when she witnesses a violent crime her life, and the lives of all the people she loves are put in danger. The fact of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time means that, for everyone’s protection, she is forced to abandon her husband and son, a sacrifice which will have profound implications for all of them.
Emma Taylor lives in Bristol with her husband Jack and daughters, fourteen-year-old Stella and eleven-year-old Amy. Emma is neurotically anxious; obsessional about security and keeping her family safe, their lives a ruled by her strict scheduling of all their daily activities. Her apparently supportive and endlessly understanding husband, who is twenty years her senior, often needs to act as mediator when Stella, a typical teenager, becomes increasingly frustrated by the tight controls her mother exerts over the family. Although it gradually becomes clear that Jack must have his own investment in maintaining the neurotic dynamics of family interactions! Stella is sick and tired of being reminded that her mother’s excessive need to keep her family safe stems from the deaths of her parents and sister in a car accident when she was seventeen; as far as Stella is concerned, her mother should have got over that by now! However, Emma has a secret she has never shared with anyone and an unexpected encounter threatens to expose this and to tear the family apart. Before long Stella realises that her mother’s behaviour is becoming even more weird than usual and she is determined to find out who her mother is meeting in secret.
This psychological thriller is told in short chapters, through the alternating voices of Lizzie, Emma and Stella and as it develops the various strands gradually come together. Whilst each of the voices is distinct and I certainly felt pulled into the struggles faced by both Lizzie and Emma, the most convincing one was that of Stella. I thought that the author beautifully captured and evoked the angst of a highly intelligent, thoughtful, disaffected, truculent and sarcastic teenage girl who was desperate for more independence and yet still in need of a sense of security and reliability in her life. All of Stella’s ideo-centric observations on life added an important extra dimension to the unfolding story. She was tenacious about finding out what secrets her mother was keeping whilst also struggling with negotiating her relationships with girlfriends and a tentatively blossoming relationship with her first boyfriend. Her relationship with her rather sweet, ballet-obsessed younger sister was beautifully evoked in what felt like a “pitch-perfect” way. The author captured all the ambivalences of the sibling relationship, with Stella’s feelings of frustration with, and her casual cruelty towards Amy masking a much stronger loving and protective attitude as she attempted to protect her sister as their mother’s behaviour became increasingly strange, secretive and distracted, threatening to destroy the family.
Although I had guessed much of the plot at an early stage, this didn’t spoil my overall enjoyment of this essentially well-crafted psychological story. I think this is probably because Sanjida Kay managed to capture the insidious and destructive nature of secrets in families, as well as the long-lasting impact and anguish of loss and desertion. She managed to keep control of the slow build-up of tension, only gradually revealing the complexities of the family dynamics and the secrets which most of the characters were hiding. For most of the time I found her characters credible, although there were moments when some of their behaviour and decision-making did stretch my credulity – there were also some moments in the plotting which required a certain suspension of disbelief!
I do think that, following the very gradual and leisurely revelations of significant past events, the resolution to the story was both very rushed and, despite the revelations which had immediately preceded it, rather less than convincing! I found it a rather facile ending which seemed so out of character with the author’s previous capacity to convey a reasonably convincing psychological coherence in her portrayals of her characters, and of the dilemmas they were facing. For most of the time I was reading I had felt inclined to give the novel a four-star rating but my frustration about the ending is what has influenced my final three-star rating. However, there are lots of themes, particularly those about secrets, identity, loss and the effects of abandonment, which would make this an interesting and thought-provoking choice for reading groups, hence my higher rating for this category.
One proviso I would add to this review is that that you shouldn’t read it if you are hungry – I found the mouth-watering descriptions of bread and cake-making to be all too deliciously evocative!