Other People's Children
Joanna Trollope, 1998
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425174371
Summary
With The Best of Friends, American readers have taken Joanna Trollope into their hearts. That critically-acclaimed novel has climbed bestseller lists around the country and garnered raves from reviewers like Good Housekeeping who said that she "captures the poignant rituals of family attachment and detachment with delicious wryness and large doses of empathy."
But with Other People's Children—a number 1 bestseller in England—she brings her work to a bold, new level, with a novel of rare seriousness and depth, about a subject that hits readers right where they live. Here, she delves fearlessly into the emotional dynamics of family life—or rather, life in that ever-expanding unit, the stepfamily.
With her sensitive eye and unerring ear, she explores the hard-won truths and often harder-to-overcome difficulties of coping with present and former husbands and wives, and above all, with other people's children. And sometimes it becomes painfully clear that good intentions—and even love—are not enough.
Joanna Trollope's understanding of the human condition and empathy with the frailties of her characters are unmatched. No one goes more fearlessly into the emotional and practical dynamics of family life, nor offers such bittersweet truths mixed with hopeful solutions. So moving, so provocative, and so unforgettable is the portrait she has created in Other People's Children that American readers and reviewers are sure to fall in love with Joanna Trollope all over again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Carolyn Harvey (pen name)
• Birth—December 9 1943
• Where—Gloucestershire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Order of the British Empire (OBE), 1996
• Currently—lives in London, England
Joanna Trollope (born in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire), is an English novelist. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls, followed by St Hugh's College, Oxford. She is distantly related to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope.
From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign Office. From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980. Trollope was formerly married to the television dramatist Ian Curteis. Trollope's books are generally upmarket family dramas and romances that somewhat transcend these genres via striking realism in terms of human psychology and relationships. Several of her novels have been adapted for television. The best-known is The Rector's Wife.
Trollope is the author of the novels Girl from the South, Next of Kin, Marrying the Mistress, Other People's Children, The Best of Friends, and A Spanish Lover, as well as The Choir and The Rector's Wife, which were both adapted for Masterpiece Theatre. Writing as Caroline Harvey, she is also the author of the historical novels The Brass Dolphin, Legacy of Love, and A Second Legacy. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As set of vulnerable, maddening, often likable characters goes about the work of forging new families amid the disruptions that come when people remarry and are forced to raise — and love — kids who have little reason to love or trust them in return.
Linda Barrett Osborne - New York Times Book Review
Trollope is an observant chronicler of middle-class domestic mess, and she knows how to turn a tale....There are no heroes in this novel and no obvious villains, either. Just believably normal people trying to get it right. The endings are not necessarily happy, but they have the ring of truth.
Linda Mallon - USA Today
Her characters are at once vexing and endearing, which is to say fully human.
Richard Yardley - Washington Post
A skilled artisan of nuance and insight reveals a vigorous new edge as she explores the painful and contentious arena of stepfamilies. Here Trollope focuses on three women and two men who wrestle with new family configurations, along with their six children, ranging from eight to 28. When Josie marries Matthew, she already has experience as both a mother and stepmother, and she feels prepared for the impending battles with Matthew's difficult and bitter ex-wife, Nadine. But her patient determination crumbles as Matthew's three children turn sullen, mutinous and downright nasty to Josie and her eight-year-old son, Rufus. "Has it ever struck you that stepchildren can be quite as cruel as stepmothers are supposed to be?" Josie asks her sister-in-law, who later observes, "Everyone seems to expect so much of women it nearly drove you mad." Things seem at first to be a lot easier for Josie's ex-husband, Tom, an architect who has two other children besides Rufus (Tom's first wife died suddenly when his children were small). In no time Tom has a fianc e, the calm and reasonable Elizabeth, whom Rufus (who visits Tom regularly) seems to like rather well. It is Tom's 25-year-old daughter, Dale, who can't bear to see her father passionately in love. The narrative moves back and forth between Josie and Elizabeth as the latter finds her new life in sudden turmoil; the spare, dramatic revelation of Dale's psychological hold on Tom injects Hitchcockian suspense. Though Trollope's wry intelligence supports the plot, her command of raw emotional content--her portraits of the children, for example--is equally impressive. The urgency of her vision adds clout to this affecting drama.
Publishers Weekly
Best-selling English writer Trollope, who has a following here as well, has the knack of rendering people's lives with infinite clarity and truth. Here she plumbs the effects of divorce and remarriage on children, as Josie and Matthew marry and try to create a family with her son and his three children. This is no Brady bunch, but the emotionally messy world of children (and adults) is so palpably real that the reader will know them as well or better than their own children. Those who have read Trollope (The Best of Friends) know that her endings are never simple, happily ever after, and one outcome here seems similar to that in Trollope's The Men and the Girls (1992). Nevertheless, her writing and characterization place her far above the commonplace. Highly recommended.
Francine Fialkoff - Library Journal
From acclaimed Britisher Trollope (The Best of Friends, 1998), a bittersweet tale of the painfully divided affections created whenever a stepfamily is formed. An adroit choreographer of the baffled dance of the contemporary English family, Trollope now details the confusions caused as old marriages end and new alliances solidify. When Josie Carver marries Matthew Mitchell, a deputy-school principal, its a second marriage for each. Both have children from their first: for Josie, its eight-year-old Rufus, while Matthew has three: Becky, 15, Rory, 12, and 10-year old Claire. The previous marriages were mutually unsatisfactory. Josie, married to widower Tom, with grown children of his own, found him decent but dull. Matthew, hitched to volatile, self-absorbed Nadine, tired of coping with her eccentric behavior. But, though stepmothers are traditionally regarded as malevolent forces, stepchildren can also behave badly. And while the Mitchell trio found mother Nadine difficult to deal with, loyalty demands that they now make Josies life difficult (as well as their fathers). In fact, Toms adult daughter Dale deliberately destroys his new romance with thirtysomething civil servant Elizabeth because Dale never got over the death of her own mother when she was a child. The parents are also tugged by loyalties to their children. Josies new marriage undergoes increasing strain as Nadine blackmails her children emotionally, the children fail at school, and Becky runs away. When Matthews three move back with him, Josie feels not just even more stressed but alienated from Matthew (who takes his children's side instead of supporting her). Still, Nadines emotional breakdown and a professional crisis for Matthew bring the family closer together, and Josies Rufus begins to feel as much a part of the new family as his half-siblings. Family ties affirmed with warmth and wisdom.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. It's often said that "Blood is thicker than water." How does this truism relate to the step-family? Discuss the ways in which being related by marriage, rather than blood, can be advantageous.
2. All three of the families in Other People's Children have their strengths and weaknesses. Which family, at the beginning of the book, would you rather belong to? Did that change by the end?
3. Do you think Elizabeth was inflexible as a result of a lifetime on her own? Or did you find her well-adjusted and too secure to adapt to a troubled household?
4. All of the men in this book show a certain weakness of character. Discuss the similarity in their shortcomings.
5. How do you think Tom should have dealt with Dale? Did you find it surprising that this seemingly placid and affluent family would fall apart?
6. Nadine obviously loves her children, yet there's no doubt she's ill-suited to motherhood. What should happen in a situation like this one? How much blame does Matthew share for not protecting his children from her volatility?
7. Do you think Tom's inability to stand up to Dale, and Matthew's failure to take a stand on behalf of Josie are similar in any way? Why is Tom's weakness fatal to his new relationship? Why does Matthew's failure not doom his new family?
8. When Lucas's relationship with Amy ends, it's clear that he has been conditioned to put Dale's needs above his own, just as Tom has. Did you feel hopeful that moving away from Dale would help him to change?
9. Discuss the complexity of Becky's loyalty to Nadine, despite her mother's instability. Do you think Josie handled Matthew's children as well as could be expected, given their complicated issues with Nadine?
10. Divorce is an extremely upsetting event for children. How could Matthew and Nadine have made theirs easier on the children? Discuss the issue money plays in this story. In what way does it contribute to strife in Matthew and Nadine's homes? How does it ease things for Rufus? Or does it?
11. Josie's determination and flexibility were not enough to save her marriage to Tom because of a lack of feeling. Elizabeth has finally met, in Tom, the man who makes her feel(yet she can't make the relationship work either. Did Dale doom both of these marriages? Pauline's ghost? Or did Tom? Or is Trollope suggesting a more complex set of issues?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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