编辑推荐ReviewAlbert Pengelly is the owner of a beautiful but unproductive Cornish farm, married to Clare, whom he adores, and with a small daughter, Ellen. When a second child, a boy, is born, Clare, suffering from post-natal depression, throws herself from a cliff with the baby in her arms. Albert is distraught, and loses interest in everything but the farm. When he's seduced by Violet - an embryonic slattern with an eye to the main chance - he marries her out of inertia. She gives birth to another girl, Josie, and they become, essentially, a dysfunctional family. Both girls are extraordinarily naive, even for the early 1960s, when behaviour patterns were only just beginning to be more lax. As a teenager Ellen still dreams of romance leading to marriage, and when she falls in love with a handsome trapeze artist from a visiting circus, and he makes love to her, she believes it's the Real Thing - but is soon disillusioned when she looks for him again and finds that the circus has moved on. Then she finds she's pregnant. Illegitimate children are still not accepted in the countryside and she's forced to give up her daughter for adoption. Josie, stunningly beautiful and discontented, runs away to London where she's taken up by a modelling agency, and corrupted by the men who organize her work schedule, until drink, drugs and unwilling sex destroy her charms and ability to control her life. Daisy, Ellen's daughter, has a happier experience and it isn't until her much-loved adoptive mother dies, leaving her a box of letters, photographs and memorabilia, that she becomes curious about who her birth mother is, and sets out on a journey of exploration into the past. The characters tend to be either black or white - too good or too evil - to be true, and manipulated to advance the storyline; but the story itself bounces along agreeably, carrying the reader with it, and rewarding her with an unforeseen development which takes everyone by surprise. (Kirkus UK) As 25-year-old Daisy reels from the death of her beloved adoptive mother, she is further shocked by a scrapbook of memories that contains long-hidden information about who she is and where she came from. Her real mother had been a poor young teenage girl from Cornwall and Daisy is determined to find out more. But unravelling the past could risk her future - with her adored dad John and with boyfriend Joel. |
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