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Monday 13 October 2014

The Secrets We Left Behind by Susan Elliot Wright

Review by The Mole

Eve hides to watch her daughter and granddaughter from afar. But it wasn't always like this. She once had a good family - a happy family - a loving family, but she kept a secret that had to come out. A big secret - one that had to change everything and things could never be the same again.

Scott has returned from New Zealand and is dying from cancer. Jo, Eve and Scott lived in a squat in Hastings in 1976. Today Eve and Darren are married and Eve's daughter, Hannah, calls Darren "daddy". Scott is Hannah's real father and now he wants the truth about their time in Hastings to be told... a secret they had agreed to keep buried forever.

The story started well and captured my imagination but then sort of stalled as I found, about 100 pages in, that I had stopped caring because it was taking so long. With nearly 300 pages left to go I was finding the idea of continuing a bit daunting. We had been told that Scott wanted their secret to be told but we had no idea of the true enormity of that secret - in fact I expected nothing like what was to come. There is a slight inference of what was to come but it had totally failed to arouse my curiosity. However I cheated by "dipping" into a later part of the book to try to understand where the story was going if I did continue, and armed with that knowledge I found I wanted to read on and finish it and I enjoyed the getting there. It was a journey worth making and the early "dipping" didn't spoil it. Perhaps a bit more or something different could have been revealed earlier?

A bit of an on/off read but on the whole one I enjoyed.

Publisher - Simon & Schuster
Genre - adult fiction

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a chunk of book needed to have been left out, if it took reading the answers to make you want to read on again. That said I wonder about the hints, how weak/strong they were overall.

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