Promises to Keep (by Alexandra Raife)

(Amazon UK link)

I very much liked Alexandra Raife’s novels the first time I read them, in the first few years of the century. She wrote twelve in all, and I acquired some of them soon after they were available in paperback. I have been re-reading them over the past couple of years, and have reached the final one again, ‘Promises to Keep’. I last read it in 2005 and had totally forgotten what it was about.

The story is mainly about a young woman called Miranda. We see her first in a prologue at the airport, awaiting Ian, who is evidently her former husband. Some crisis has struck their daughter… but we don’t learn what has happened until much later in the book.

The first proper chapter takes us back to the time when Ian and Miranda, still students, got married. They had been best friends for most of their lives, so this wasn’t a sudden decision: but, as Miranda acknowledges later, they hadn’t really thought through what the commitment of marriage meant. And then she becomes pregnant, unintentionally, and things start to go downhill in her relationship with Ian.

It’s a character-based book, sometimes dipping into the past, where we see Ian and Miranda, both comfortably off and popular, very keen on skiing and other sports. Ian’s childhood home was not as happy or comfortable as Miranda’s; his father was grumpy, his mother died when he was young, and he has two rather strange aunts.

But most of the book follows, in a gentle and somewhat rambling way, Miranda’s life over the next twenty years. We see her pregnancy and then the difficult first months with a demanding, colicky and very angry baby. The author piles on as many problems as possible: baby Alexy is difficult to feed, doesn’t grow very fast, and cries so much that Miranda is permanently exhausted. A far cry from the happy, chuckling baby her parents had hoped for.

And it doesn’t get easier. Other than a few gummy smiles, Alexy is a most unrewarding child. Even her grandmother finds her hard to like, as she fights her way through the toddler years, offering no affection, and no appreciation of anything. She is clearly very bright, but makes no friends, and clings tight to her mother despite apparently despising her.

Miranda inwardly blames herself for the way her daughter has turned out, but outwardly blames Ian for leaving when he did. On his rare visits, she fights with him and Alexy rejects him. Alexy is really the most dislikeable child. I felt sorry for her at times, but she is so unfailingly obnoxious that I soon lost all sympathy. I’m not convinced anybody could be quite so unpleasant, no matter how bad the parenting was - and Miranda and Ian did their best, despite difficult circumstances.

There are many other sub-plots, as Miranda gradually gets to know some of Ian’s relatives and other folk are introduced. I liked the gentle, academic Will who moves into her life for a while, and his sons Adam and Tim who are the direct opposite of Alexy in almost every way: pleasant, friendly, likeable lads, although their mother was considerably worse than Miranda in many respects.

The ending, which happens a tad too abruptly for my tastes, is entirely satisfactory in one respect. However it never resolves the problem of Alexy, or what is going to happen to her in future. Miranda is encouraged to let go, to see her as an adult, and to accept that she will make her own decisions; but I found the whole relationship with Alexy (and Alexy herself) to be quite disturbing. But then it’s a mark of skilled writing to elicit such a strong response from a reader about any character.

There are odd mentions of people from the author’s previous novels, enabling readers to catch up on what has happened to them in passing; but it’s certainly not necessary to have read any of her other books before this one. Overall I enjoyed it, and found it quite difficult to put down once I was about half-way through.

Recommended if you like character-based women’s fiction. Not currently in print, but it's the kind of book that is fairly often found second-hand online or in charity shops.

Review by Sue F copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews