Thirty-three-year-old Ruth Henderson and her daughter Maggie have some hard choices to make.
Following the tragic death of Maggie’s father, they are left with a mountain of debt and broken hearts. So, despite her vow never to return home after the fall-out from her teenage pregnancy, Ruth
can’t see any option other than for the two of them to move back in with her parents.
Going home means many things – finally confronting her estranged father, navigating her mother’s desperate need to make everything ok despite the wobbles in her own marriage, not to mention helping a still-grieving Maggie to settle into a new school, find new friends, and stop expressing her emotions through her ever-changing hair colour.
What Ruth needs are friends, but she abandoned her childhood ones when she left all those years ago. Luckily for Ruth, they haven’t abandoned her. Slowly she lets herself be embraced by a group of
women who have always had her back – even when she didn’t know it. And as the grief and shock recede, Ruth can even begin to imagine sharing her life with someone other than just Maggie – if Maggie will let her.
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Beth Moran is the award winning author of ten contemporary fiction novels, including the top ten bestseller Just the Way You Are and #1 bestseller Let It Snow. Her books are set in and around Sherwood Forest, where she can be found most mornings walking with her spaniel Murphy. She has the privilege of also being a foster carer to teenagers, and enjoys nothing better than curling up with a pot of tea and a good story.
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My thoughts: there’s lots of different families in this book, from the Henderson clan, to Lois and Matt and their five hundred foster kids (ok, just five, but still), to Ruth and Maggie, and David, Arnold and Ana Lucia. Families are not just born, they’re made, built from love. There’s also the family Ruth finds in her friends, and in the church her parents go to.
I grew up in the church and some of my oldest, closest friends are part of my church family, so I really resonated with that. You can find family all over the place.
And Ruth really needs them all – her parents, her sisters, her daughter, her pals. Even grumpy Veronica and Hannah, who lives mostly in her memories. She’s been through a really rough time, losing her partner, leaving her horrible job, having to sell her house and discovering a mountain of secret debts her partner didn’t deal with.
And then there’s creepy Carl, who won’t leave her alone. She really doesn’t need his weird and scary nonsense on top of trying to get her life back together. And Maggie needs her mum, she just doesn’t know what to say. My heart was aching for her. Fourteen is a horrible age, without all the grief and trauma she’s dealing with.
But the book isn’t all sadness and bleak misery, there’s a lot of cake, there’s dancing, there’s new life (literally a baby is born), there’s new jobs and new love and parties and I loved girls’ night. When Ruth lets the people in her life help her, support her, then she can thrive. A joyful book really.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 