1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What happened next, 10 Sep 2009
Hannah lives with her Aunt Hope and Uncle Ber, because her father is dead and her mother is in a home for the mentally ill. Her mother became mentally unstable after a car accident killed her eldest child, Ivo, when Hannah was just a baby. Relationships can be fraught because Aunt Hope is a demanding substitute parent who is also a teacher, though Hannah, perhaps understandably, is not an easy child. We see everything through the eyes of Hannah, and it is only gradually, as she grows up, that we come to understand more about the background, not just of the tragedy of Ivo's death, but of Aunt Hope herself.
This is a wonderfully engrossing book which occasionally jumps in time from Hannah as a child to her adult self and her complicated relationships with her own son, Finch, and her partner Diarmid. That it is a novel which sometimes withholds information is not detrimental to the unfolding story, which travels at a pace consonant with the events it contains. It is both a coming-of-age story and a kind of mystery. Hannah's narrative is starkly honest - allowing the reader to both disapprove of her and empathise at various points of the plot. It also makes for a most engaging and interesting narrative - one cannot second-guess what will happen next or what will be revealed. A fascinating unravelling of this complicated set of family, and other, relationships makes this novel a satisfying and engrossing read. If you like Georgina Hammick's writing here I would also recommend her brilliant short-story collection People For Lunch.
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