Author: Sinéad Moriarty
Book Name: This Child of Mine
Series: *
Order: *
Genre: Literature, Family
Rating: Didn’t Like
Blurb: Single mom Anna and her eighteen-year-old daughter Sophie have always got along like two peas in a pod. Anna would do anything for Sophie but what if, years ago, she went too far to protect her?
Teenager Mandy has always worried about her fragile mom, artist Laura. Mandy knows she has never come to terms with the loss of her first child, but her mom won’t speak about it. Is she hiding something, and how much does Mandy want to find out?
When Sophie makes a chance discovery about her mother’s past, her whole life is turned upside-down. And, as she begins a search for the truth, her world collides with Laura’s and Mandy’s. What is the secret that connects their lives? And is the mother-daughter bond strong enough to withstand the devastating truth?
I was a little shocked after reading the last Sinéad Moriarty book to find that I genuinely didn’t like this one. Normally, if I like a book from an author, I will find I like others. Maybe to differing degrees, but still within a similar range. Not so in this case.
The main thing for me was that I could not, in any way like ANY of these characters. Anna was this perfect, infallible person but she never really truly admits to any wrong doing. Laura is a joke, horribly messed up, knows she is horribly messed up, but again it feels like she never takes takes any actual responsibility, not in any real way. Sophie’s reactions just all feel extreme and off for what her history has been. Yes, I could see justification and motivations and all of that. I understood it, but none of it came off as truly believable.
The other thing, and one that nearly killed this book for me, was the constant confusion of which character’s perspective I was reading. Each chapter started with one of the three main characters, as a heading, indicating that chapter was dedicated to that person’s perspective. Then, you are suddenly reading from a different character’s perspective, without warning or obvious shift, sometimes even getting little glimpses from the secondary characters like Mandy or Holly. It was seriously confusing at times. Normally I enjoy multi-perspective books, but when you are expecting one and are suddenly thrust into another it is not only confusing, but it is distracting and takes away from the story.
Between the confusion and the serious lack of likability of any of the characters, I just did not like this one.
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