The RNA Memoir, Fabulous at Fifty is published, out there, and we’re starting to get feedback. So far it’s all been very nice, which is a relief as the book is supposed to be a celebration.

But it set me thinking about reviews. Who writes them.  What they say. Why we care.

And we do care. I’ve seen fellow authors in tears over a nasty review on Amazon.  Sometimes they were pure spite; sometimes they were clearly written by other authors with a hobby horse to ride. (Academics do this too, only more so. ) But adverse reviews are not all bad if they tell you something useful about what’s between the covers. The reviewer might not have liked it but, hey, you’re an independent reader and you make up your own mind, don’t you? By contrast, ‘another cracking book,’ flattering though it may be to the author, doesn’t really tell you anything.

The very nicest comment we have had so far on Fab @50 is from author Elizabeth Hawksley.  She writes: ‘I think you’ve pitched it just right, part history, part biography, part anecdote and a bit of social history as well.  It’s a great record for the future. Some new editor in 2060 is going to love you!’   It is a particularly welcome comment because Elizabeth, as a novelist and long time member of the RNA, gets it. She sees what we were trying to do and thinks we brought it off. Yay! 

But what of the reviewer who doesn’t get what you’re trying to do?  Someone like, for sake of argument, my friend Theophilus Ecologicus  were he to be forced to read one of my novels. He doesn’t have much truck with fiction anyway and is particularly picky about anything romantic. (7 Brides for 7 Bros is okay, where the guys keep moving and singing and nobody does any of that embarrassing looking-into-each-other’s eyes muck.)  An adverse comment from him could be the highest compliment in my terms and the terms of my favourite readers.

So, here is my Wish List of comments on my next novel, whenever it is published:

I laughed, I cried, I couldn’t put it down  – Katie Fforde

A hero to die for – Sara Craven

Fantabulous. I loved it. Thank you! – the Kind Reader who took time out to contact me after reading my short story in the RNA Collection LOVES ME, LOVES ME NOT.  Thank YOU, Kind Reader

I want to play that man – Hugh Jackman

Truthful, funny and hopeful – the World’s Best Librarian.

A bit soppy – Theophilus E 

And the last one clinches it.  Let’s hear it for Theophilus.

Burrowing in the RNA Archives (never happier than when burrowing, me), I splorted when I read the adjudication for the 1973 Romantic Novel of the Year.

The co-ordinating judge was Tom Eagle, who had run the romance list at Herbert Jenkins until 1968. When he retired, the publisher closed the list. Eagle had been a bookseller (Hatchards) and a magazine editor before Herbert Jenkins recruited him. As far as authors were concerned, his philosophy was clearly treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen.

RNA President Diane Pearson, then an editor at Corgi, describes that year’s winner, The House of Kuragin, as a ground breaker. It was the first time an historical novel had headed the short list and also it was the first time Heinemann had been one of the RNA’s winning publishers, reported the News.  Diane says that it made the book trade sit up, shocked that a ‘big sweep’ novel could win the Award. As a result, it radically broadened the range of books that would be entered henceforward.  

Mr Eagle’s assessment was more moderate.  ‘This is a novel on a not unfamiliar pattern, with something of the Gothic atmosphere but nicely written and admirably characterised. The early Nineteenth Century is lightly but adequately sketched in, and the feudal Russian scene with its extremes of wealth and poverty is well described – witness episodes of autocratic cruelty and sabotage by vengeful serfs.’ The love story, he said, ‘runs its uneven and, seemingly, disastrous course, culminating eventually in a not too contrived happy ending. To briefly sum up: romance, intrigue, tragedy and suspense are skilfully blended in a novel which should certainly satisfy many readers.’

‘Not too contrived happy ending.’  Wow.

When Tom Eagle retired, Marjorie McEvoy, who had sold him her first romantic novel in 1960, wrote a farewell in The RNA News. ‘Never extravagantly over-enthusiastic in praise of manuscripts, a word of congratulation from him was all the more to be treasured when it did materialise.’  Too right.

What would the You’re Worth It generation have done to the old curmdugeon?

Over a year ago, the Romantic Novelists Association decided to publish a memoir to mark its 50th Anniversary in 2010. President Diane Pearson and I have been working on it and next week it is published. Yay!

Going through the archives, I felt I’d met some wonderful people, I never knew in person. Amazing to see how  publishing, bookselling and libraries changed totally over the course of the sixties.  And as for sex . . .  Philip Larkin was right. It started in 1963. Well, sex as we know it, Jim.

Like many people who spent this past weekend at the RNA conference in the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, I’m coming down from a high. So many friends, old and new, so many fascinating books to buy, so many ideas. . .  I am slowly writing up my notes and am struck by two things which other people said and one which I thought myself:

1) Romance is turning into the genre that dare not speak its name. A publisher told us that the readers wanted romance (mystery with an element of romance outsells mystery without it) but didn’t want it called that. So call your romantic suspense ‘psychological suspense’ and you’re in with a better chance of a publishing deal. Later, editors told us they were looking for ‘stealth romance’. 

Somehow in the twenty-first century, when every sort of sexual encounter is commonplace in film and television and extreme swearing is positively de rigueur for the aspiring comedian, we have managed to make romance unacceptable.  Um – why? And who does it so bitterly offend? Needs thinking about, that.

2) A thoughtful talk from the RNA’s Koh-i-Noor (copyright Katie Fforde, that one) asserted ‘Romance is not trivial.’ As one who has always said that, when you fall in love, you might as well load a gun and pass it across into the hands of the beloved, I completely agree. Romantic love is dangerous. It can make people crazy. Even if they hang on to some sort of normality, it can still make them do (and think) completely new things that would never have occurred to them before. It is a very big adventure. And what are we, if we refuse the call to adventure?

3) And now my own Brilliant Thought  – well, okay, what occurred to me as I walked back under a glimmering night sky, with the Thames hushing and slushing to my right, Canary Wharf all lit up across the water and a strong whiff of fish in the air … 

Even though romance is not trivial, it can be playful. (Think of the disguised Rosalind teasing Orlando in As You Like It. She ties him up in knots but, once he’s gone, she says to Celia, ‘Oh coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know the fathom deep I am in love’. Quite.) Teasing and fantasy are all part of the adventure, from Mills & Boon to An Equal Music.    

Which brings me to my last point. Up-cheering. Now the buzz is over, I am feeling a bit flat. So I went to The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser for a quick fix. And it was such a shot in the arm, I thought I would share a little, in case other people are feeling down, too.

Captain Avery was everything that a hero of historical romance should be; he was all of Mr Sabatini’s supermen rolled into one, and he knew it. The sight of him was enough to make ordinary men feel they were wearing odd socks, and women to go weak at the knees. … His finely chiselled features bespoke both the man of action and the philosopher, their youthful lines tempered by a maturity beyond his years; there was beneath his composed exterior a hint of steely power, etc., etc. You get the picture.

… In short, Captain Avery was the young Errol Flynn, only more so, with a dash of Power and Redford thrown in; the answer to a maiden’s prayer, and between ourselves rather a pain in the neck. For besides being gorgeous, he had a starred first from Oxford, could do the hundred in evens, played the guitar to admiration, helped old women across the street, kept his fingernails clean, said his prayers, read Virgil and Aristophanes for fun, and generally made the Admirable Crichton look like an illiterate snob. However, he is vital if you are to get the customers in.  

Ah yes. The customers. God bless ’em, every one.

The Romantic Novelists’ Association is not the only one with a 50th birthday this year. So does TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I admit that surprised me, maybe because the book is actually set in the thirties and the Depression stalks through it. To celebrate, there are loads of events being planned in the US and Harper Collins are publishing a book of ‘How Important the Book is to Me’  with contributions from notables, including Scott Torow and Oprah Winfrey.

That made me think of my own first reading of the book.  It was given to me by a cousin of my father’s who read voraciously and said, ‘This is probably too old for you.’  I read it in a sitting, even though there were moments when I could hardly bear to read on.  For a couple of weeks, maybe more, it knocked everything else out of my head – school, friends, hobbies, the lot – and I worked on autpilot, while in my head I wandered around in Maycomb, Alabama, desperately trying to work out how that trial could have gone right, instead of so appallingly, heartbreakingly wrong.    

Maybe I was too young to read the book, certainly I was too insular.  I knew nothing about racial tensions in the US or anywhere else, still less the Civil Rights Movement.  What got me by the throat was the tragedy of Tom Robinson,  completely helpess as things get out of hand, when a white woman fancies him and the forces of received opinion go on the rampage.  And Scout, tomboy, confident, hopeful Scout, who believes her father can do anything and slowly realizes that he can’t.  And Atticus.  Oh, Atticus, the first character who made me understand that being honest, and compassionate and logical is sometimes not enough. 

I broke my heart over Atticus, in way I didn’t over Tom.  Tom was the victim of a natural disaster, as if he’d been standing in the way of an avalanche.  There wasn’t anything he could do to prevent it or, once it had happened, to deal with the consequences.  He had to have a Champion and the Champion was Atticus.

So Atticus wasn’t supposed to be a victim, he was the Knight Errant, Robin Hood against the wicked self-servers.   He was supposed to defend the innocent and restore right.  By all the rules of justice, chivalry and story telling, Atticus should have been able to get that jury to see the truth.  And he failed.   Atticus’s defeat was my defeat.  His integrity was inspiring but not a consolation. I wept for both of us.  

Later, when I was older, I could see that everything was more complicated than I had first though, Atticus included.  Even today, if I re-read the book, I find new things to think about, new characteristics which explain people’s behaviour, including the most appalling. 

But what I took away that first time, was the shocked realisation that right doesn’t always prevail and fathers, even the most heroically rational fathers who try to do their best, aren’t all-powerful.  As a result, in a shuffling, embarrassed and not very articulate way, I grew very tender of my own father.  Up to then, we had simply fought.  

So yes, it opened my eyes to racism and the southern USA and the narrowness of small towns and the bullying that happens in small communities and how poverty makes people bitter and how bitter people look for people to blame and … and … and …  But the big thing for me was compassion, especially between father and daughter, and it slipped into the way I think about life, the universe and everything.  

A wonderful book.      

Happy Father’s Day.

Just a few days ago, Sarah Duncan wrote a very wise blog post about the perils of perfectionism.  It really struck home to me.

In most of my life, I’m very much of the ‘good enough’ persuasion.  One of my never-to-be-forgotten school reports actually said ‘Jennifer is too easily satisfied’.   In the day job, I always did the best I could to cover as much as I could, in the time available, and felt fine that I couldn’t do everything.  At home, I can never cook a dish the same way twice because I always end up tweaking  the  taste at the last moment. And I don’t have a conscience about that either. 

But in my writing, I’m the reverse.  A friend of mine says I’m a prize tiffler.  Her view is that I hang on to books, changing a phrase here, a bit of dialogue there,  for months after I should have seen they were ready and let them go. 

 Even when I get my authors’ copies and start to re-read, I’ll find things I’d really like to change and reach for a pencil.  I utterly sympathised with John Fowles when he had a second go at THE MAGUS ten years after its first (highly successful) publication.  Though I have to admit that I preferred the first version – which should have taught me something, I suppose.

One thing I have learned from my own horrible habit is that being picky picky can pummel the life out of a story – and the perfectionist has no one to blame but himself.

So, after reading Sarah Duncan’s wise words, I promised myself that I would do only one rough draft, one clean draft.  And, as it happens, I had an idea which had been coughing gently to be let out since  – well, since I met a few writer friends for lunch last month, actually.

So – I did it.  Well, I admit it was more like three rough drafts.  But for a woman who has got up into the thirties in the past, you have to agree, that is a big step forward.  Admittedly it was a longish short story, not a whole novel.  But the thing is I did it and I’ve put it up here.

Thank you, Sarah.

Now all I have to do is resist the temptation to open the Edit Function every day and tweak a bit more . . .

Respected journalist and frustrated romantic. Danuta Kean, had a toot about modern romantic novels in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, following the recent Romantic Novel of the Year Award.  Her particular beef is what we novelists have done to our heroes.  And there’s a poll at the Daily Mail’s website which says that, so far, 71% of people who bother to vote agree with her.  I’m still pondering that one and will possibly come back to it.

But what grabbed me was her reference to her own year as a judge, when we asked a group of men to read two or more of the short listed novels and come along and discuss them.  The jamboree under reference took place in my house and I was catering, so most of my attention in the early stages was focused on serving industrial sized shepherds pie and extracting corks.  My notes are therefore not comprehensive – but I did scribble down stuff that struck me at the time, and jolly interesting it is, if a bit grub-and-booze-stained. 

There were, I think, 9 men at supper.  They had each read at least two;  none of them had read all.  They ranged from 25 – 65, all of them read novels for fun but none of them was in the writing business.  The shortlisted books were:

• A Good Voyage by Katharine Davies (Chatto and Windus) 
• Love and Devotion by Erica James (Orion)
• Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)
• The Hornbeam Tree by Susan Lewis (Heinemann-Random House)
• The Tenko Club by Elizabeth Noble (Hodder)
• Ghost Heart by Cecilia Samartin (Bantam World     

From my notes, it is clear that overwhelmingly three things hit me at the time – 1) the guys’ trepidation at reading romantic fiction at all;  2) a feeling that they were spying while doing so;  and 3) what, if anything, they thought romantic.

1)      Trepidation is basically the Bertie Wooster Syndrome.  You may recall that Wooster, endeavouring to retrieve a letter from Gussie Fink-Nottle giving Madeleine Bassett the heave ho,  is surprised mid-burglary by Madeleine herself.  Unfortunately, he is clutching her photograph at the time.  Much moved, she tells him the story of Rose M Banks’s romantic best selling opus Mervyn Keene, Clubman, of whose hero the unfortunate Bertram reminds her.  She does so in a low voice, the reader will remember, ‘with a goodish amount of throb in it’.  What our guys feared, as they squared up to novels that women thought romantic, is encapsulated in the Wooster reaction.  

Well, it was difficult, of course, to know quite what comment to make.  I said ‘Oh, ah!’ but I felt at the time that it could have been improved on.  The fact is, I was feeling a bit stunned.  I had always known in a sort of vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worst tripe – Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output – but I had never supposed her capable of bilge like this.‘  Ah, nobody says it better than PG Wodehouse. 

2)     Spying – ‘I feel like a peeping Tom,’  one guy said at the time.   Others, generally the younger end, agreed.  Romantic novels, they felt, were girls’ locker room stuff and they didn’t really want to see in!   Older men tended to be more robust about the revelation of What Women Talk About, but professed themselves puzzled at the results.  ‘It all goes round and round but nobody does anything,’  said one.  ‘If the characters are not going to change something, why don’t they just stop picking at it and shut up?’  Small Island and Ghost Heart were largely but not entirely exempt from this, but A Good Voyage, a modern re-telling of Twelfth Night, was included.

3)    Romantic for Men?  All of our  book group said they had been moved by one or more romantic novels at some point, even if not these.  I couldn’t find one who was a fan of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and the Jane Austen afficionados weren’t in it for the romance.  But the Lady of the Camellias had a couple of supporters.  The only contemporary novel that anyone mentioned was Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, which one of the group thought was true heart-wringing stuff and a bloody good book into the bargain.  (I must say, I agree.)

One other oddity was that they were all easily distracted from character and plot into talking about the socio-political issues of  Small Island and Ghost Heart.  The former benefitted, since nobody thought racism was a good thing.  The latter, in some ways an elegy for pre-Castro Cuba, suffered from those who already had a political position, which was generally that Castro was better than his predecessor.  None of them enjoyed – as I did, profoundly – its utter longing for a Paradise lost.  

I see that at the time I concluded that our group  of male readers weren’t hostile to romantic fiction but :

• they want less talk and more do
• emotional hypchondria a no no
• exclusively domestic and personal stories makes them feel claustrophobic
• want something to be achieved, a mystery solved, or a point to be proved

But, I must say, not one of them, unlike Danuta, commented on the heroes’ sex appeal or lack of it.

Could it be that men and women are different?

Moved – as who could not be? – by this week’s honouring of British Heroes of the Holocaust, I have been re-reading the memoir that RNA President Mary Burchell, first published in 1950. Mira Books republished it in 2008 as Safe Passage under her real name, Ida Cook.

She was very much loved by members of the Romantic Novelists Association, having done a major reconciliation job on the organisation after it tore itself apart in the mid sixties over media sniggers at anything with ‘romantic’ in the title.   She was one of Mills & Boon’s brightest stars and proud of it.  ‘I am a born romantic’, she told the RNA, on taking up the presidency.  For her, romance was ‘akin to optimism and the determination to make the best of things, and has taken many people over dreary difficulties and prompted others to dare the impossible.’  She knew of what she spoke.  For, from 1934 to the start of the War, she had been daring the impossible in a big way, helping Jews to escape from Nazi Germany. 

She was only thirty – thirty! –  when her friend, the Romanian soprano Viorica Ursuleac, asked her and her sister Louise to take care of Madame Mayer-Lismann, official lecturer at the Salzburg Festival, who was coming to lecture in London.  Ida and Louise were flattered – they were both serious opera groupies and had encountered Ursuleac and her husband, conductor Clemens Krauss by standing in stage door queues – but bewildered.  The white haired sophisticate spoke fluent English and seemed better able to look after herself than they did.  However, they took her on a sight seeing tour in London and, when she asked whether St Paul’s was a Protestant or Catholic church, asked politely which she was herself.  Mitia Mayer-Lismann was astonished.  But she was Jewish.  Didn’t they know?  No, said Ida, they hadn’t thought about it. And she comments:  ‘We didn’t know – imagine!  We didn’t know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt-am-Main already had the seeds of tragedy in it.’

And that was how a couple of opera-mad civil service typists turned themselves into the Scarlet Pimpernel.  Except that, unlike Sir Percy, they had no League, no contacts, and above all no money.  Mary Burchell had not yet published a book (her first was Wife to Christopher in 1936).  When she got her first contract with Mills & Boon, she left the Civil Service to write full time and a large part of her earnings went into helping refugees.  ‘Our guardian angels must have been looking over our shoulders at that time,’  she wrote.  ‘Before we had any chance to alter our way of living or get into the habit of spending what seemed to us then great sums, the full horror of what was happening in Europe finally, and for all time, came home to us.’

‘And so, at the very moment when I was making big money for the first time in my life, we were presented with this terrible need. …. it was much the most romantic thing that ever happened to us. … If we had always had the money we might not have thought we had anything to spare.  But I still had never handled more than five pounds a week in my life, and suddenly my income was rising to five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand a year;  big money then.’

It was not enough.    Ida started to raise funds, first from friends and contacts, then through speaking to groups, though she had never done anything like it before.  And she and Louise kept going back to Germany and Austria, ostensibly to hear opera, while they organised British guarantors for the people they helped and, just as important, smuggled out jewels and furs so that the refugees would have something to live on when they arrived. 

Ida was often afraid and appalled.   ‘Sometimes we thought we could not bear to go back into that hateful, diseased German atmosphere.’  But if they faltered, the friendship and support of Ursuleac and Krauss got them going again. 

Their parents, too, were a great source of strength.  The sisters continued to live at home, putting the flat that Ida had acquired in Dolphin Square at the disposal of the refugees.  Once, returning from a particularly harrowing trip, Ida went into the kitchen where her mother was making pastry, and burst into tears.  ‘If she had stopped and made a sentimental fuss of me I would have cried for hours,’  she wrote.  ‘She simply went on making pastry.  In three minutes I was all right.’  Safe Passage is dedicated to her ‘Incomparable Parents, without whose loving and common-sense upbringing we should never have been capable of doing the things described in this book.’ 

They were truly remarkable.  Ida fought bureacracy – with a truly impressive sympathy for the difficulties of the bureacrat himself, however irritating.  She never got hardened to the sufferings of others, no matter how much awfulness she saw.  She never gave up hope.  She was always sensitive – read her piece on how, in December 1938, the British Vice Consul in Frankfurt told her she couldn’t jump the queue of despairing people, saying ‘I’m sorry.  But do you realize that some of these people have been waiting since seven o clock in the morning to speak to me?  I’m afraid you must go away and wait your turn.’  She had a desperate mother and daughter to help but she noted, ‘As I and the Bauers withdrew, everyone smiled sympathetically, and I had the curious impression that they had become human beings again.  They had rights, just like any other human being.  It had just been demonstrated for them before their own eyes.’    He let Ida come back after hours and the Chief Consul’s teenage daughter, pitching in with her mother, took the details and agreed that they had to see her father.  And he found a way to get the Bauers to England eventually.

The other thing that clearly saw Ida through this terrible time was her sense of humour.  Pushed into bringing a valuable diamond brooch to England in 1938, she was horrified to find ‘a great oblong of blazing diamonds’.  Fortunately, she says, she was wearing a six shilling and elevenpenny satin M&S jumper with glass buttons, so she pinned it on that, daringly left her coat open and hoped everyone would think the brooch came from Woolworths.  They did. 

A wonderful woman.

 My fifth account of a book on the Romantic Novel of the Year long list, though actually this is one I had already read before the list was published.

THE SUMMER HOUSE by Mary Nichols spans World Wars 1 and 2, metropolis and village, big house and slum terrace.   It was a time of enormous change, in social conventions, moral values, class structures and education and one of the many delights of this book is the author’s unobtrusive but faultless sense of place and time.  

Essentially, this is the story of tragedy in three women’s lives – and how they survive and grow afterwards.  The constraints of the times affect the practical outcomes.  But the feelings, described here with a restraint that makes them all the more painful,  are universal.  During the Great War young Lady Helen marries a man her family feels at home with and then, finding him a stranger, falls in love with someone else.  Her family cannot permit her to keep a child that is not her husband’s, so she is hustled into something close to prison until the birth and then the child is taken away.  The moral disdain of those employed to help her through the birth is chilling but the withdrawal of affection from her family is worse and rings heartbreakingly true.   Eventually, widowed and orphaned by the War, Helen sets out to find her daughter.  But the lies she has been told, and holes in the records make it  very difficult – and when she does, she has to confront a whole human dilemma.

Anne  sacrifices everything, including the emotional honesty of her marriage and her own self-aproval, to have a child.  And Laura,  the precious and beloved daughter,  discovers when Anne dies that she has been lied to throughout her life.  The relationship of the three women is spiky and difficult and utterly believable.  They may be jealous, they are certainly fearful, and they have deep wounds to deal with, but they all, in their own way, try to be reasonable, even to those who can hurt them.  Laura, caught up in the consequences of old secrets, does cry out at one point, ‘It’s like a contagion, spreading and spreading.  I don’t feel like being fair.  No one’s been fair to me.’   But these women are practical and honest and, in the end, Laura is fair, in spite of intense provocation.  It is nothing short of heroic.

The most important love affair – well, this is long-listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year, after all – is mainly told from the hero’s point of view, and is a real heart-turner.  He is one of the good guys, quiet and responsible and outshone by flashier chaps – at least two of them in this book.  And then the awful thing happens and he starts to think of himself as a monster.  

A rich, understated book of many dimensions –  including a whole East Anglian village coming to terms with the wartime arrival of American troops.  It is  a five handkerchief weepie along the way with, ultimately a  deeply satisfying resolution, in which steadfastness is rewarded and endurance justified.   A feast

 DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Mary Nichols is an author I am proud to call a mate.  She is also a Treasure of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.  In 2009 she had three books, all in different genres, published within six weeks of each other and celebrated her diamond wedding anniversary.  She got a card from the Queen – and a blog post from us.

This is my fourth book from the Romantic Novel of the Year longlist:  BEACHCOMBING  by Maggie Dana. 

I’ve actually been reading steadily through the long list and not blogging at all in the busy few weeks since Christmas.  (Okay, I admit it, that’s my priorities for you.)   As a result, I’m backed up with notes on several other long-listers.  Will put them up in short order, I promise.

BEACHCOMBING is another first novel.  This time it’s from the MacMillan New Writing stable which, along with Authonomy and the Romantic Novelists’  own New Writing Scheme, are seen as good routes to publication .

Jill Hunter had a boyfriend when she was a teenager, the sort of boyfriend that teenagers dream about and almost nobody finds – handsome, kind, considerate, divinely competent, and not ashamed to hold hands.  They have a moment of passion and then he disappears.  Well, his father is disgraced and the family moves away, but it’s hardly his fault and he never gets in touch.  It niggles.  Even after moving continents, marriage, divorce, two sons and a whole load of life experiences, a bit of Jill still has this question mark – and this template of perfect love.

Flashbacks are an integral part of this book and one of it strengths is that you see how the teenager is still part of the mature woman – and vice versa.  The plot moves from Jill’s beach home (and hanging-on-by-the-fingernails career) in small town Connecticut to London and Cornwall, where friends from the teenage past resurface.   Pretty soon the reader is thinking:  there’s more than one mystery here, but Jill has only noticed the missing boyfriend.  Most satisfyingly, you have to wait but you get the answer to that other mystery too, along with the emotional truth which as a teenager she did not question.     

As for the missing BF – he resurfaces too.  He still has wonderfully kind green eyes.  Jill does what  probably 99% of us would, given the chance.    

This book is very good about female friendship, about kindness, about the shore and the store and the pressures of only-just-earning-a-living.  (The scene where Jill goes head to head with a loathesome client had me punching the air in pure wish fulfilment.  Yay!)  Jill is a practical, up-beat funny woman and you are delighted to spend time with her first person narrative.  She can dream, she can be sad, but basically, she’s a problem solver with a heart, who just happens to be what my grandmother would have called A Bad Picker.

But do not worry, Bad Picker though she is, a true hero is there.  You recognise him because he does things for her that will warm the heart of every woman, well every woman I know, anyway.  Read the book and find out. 

DECLARATION  OF INTEREST    I’d never heard of Maggie Dana until I picked up this book.  So this author is a complete stranger to me, too.