The Wrong Child (by Patricia Kay)

(Amazon UK link)

I had never heard of Patricia Kay, although I gather she’s quite a prolific writer from the United States. I downloaded this free for my Kindle about a year ago, and decided to read it recently, the bulk of that being on a flight.

‘The Wrong Child’ has an unusual premise: due to a terrible blizzard followed by a tragedy, two baby girls are accidentally switched at birth. The prologue is abrupt and melodramatic, and the first two or three chapters are then a bit confusing with quite a large cast of people. I realised that the book was going to follow the lives of the two switched babies, but it took me a while before I sorted out exactly who was who.

However I soon found myself absorbed in the storyline. Quiet, gentle Abbie, who is a writer, has raised an outgoing, highly artistic daughter, Kendall. She has done this on her own, after her rather older husband left her and refuses to have anything to do with the child. She regularly comes into conflict with her mother who sees Kendall as far more satisfactory than her quiet - and sometimes stubborn - daughter.

Meanwhile, not far away, a successful businessman called Logan is learning to be a single father after losing his beloved wife. His teenage son Patrick is very like him, but his daughter Erin is shy and sensitive. They both miss their mother, and Erin spends a lot of time with her mother’s sister Elizabeth, who is fond of Erin but basically quite self-centred. Erin would like Elizabeth to marry her father, and Elizabeth is quite keen too…

When the girls are both eleven years old, Abbie learns, due to a routine blood test, that she cannot possibly be Kendall’s mother. She can’t believe it at first, but gradually she manages to piece together the story. She determines to keep it to herself but she starts having nightmares, and eventually tracks down Logan.

It’s perhaps too easy; they don’t even live very far away, and there are some convenient coincidences that make the plot a tad unrealistic and the eventual outcome rather predictable. But it’s nicely done, with some good characterisation in the four main characters. I particularly liked Erin and could empathise with a lot of what she was going through.

There are one or two places where I felt the writing became a tad too introspective; there’s a lot of heart-searching, and some of it feels a bit repetitive. But it wasn’t difficult to skim. There’s some ongoing romantic tension which I thought well done, on the whole; unfortunately when this is resolved, the author goes into intimate detail rather than gently closing the bedroom door. But, again, it was easy enough to skip a few pages.

Perhaps the eventual capitulation of various minor characters is unrealistic, but it doesn’t matter too much. The ending ties up lots of ends a little too neatly, and the final paragraph seems a little overdone… but eminently satisfactory. It was obviously going to be a happy-ever-after story, so something of this nature had to happen sooner or later.

On the whole I would recommend this if you like character-based women’s fiction with a lot more than a simple romance, and don’t mind some suspension of reality. It made ideal reading for what would otherwise have been rather a dull flight. As a free download for the Kindle it was excellent value too, although it is no longer available free.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews