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