Ten Years On (by Alice Peterson)

(Amazon UK link)

I very much liked the novels by Alice Peterson when I first read them, and am enjoying re-reading them nearly a decade later. In fact, a tad ironically,  it’s less than nine years since I first read ‘Ten Years On’ but I had entirely forgotten the storyline.

Becca is the main character. We meet her first in a prologue, in her university years with her boyfriend Ollie and his best friend Joe. They’ve been out for New Year’s Eve, and are somewhat inebriated. After celebrating with friends, they decide that they will look ahead ten years, wondering where they will be. Ollie thinks he would like to be a rock star, and Becca determines that she will travel, learn languages, and be a painter. Joe insists that they can’t know, and he’s not playing.

The action then moves ten years into the future, and Becca has suffered a terrible tragedy. She has no idea how she is going to live, and tries, at first, throwing herself into her work. But it doesn’t really help, though it doesn’t take long for her to realise that she does, in fact, have a very important reason to keep going. But she needs a break, so she goes to stay with her parents for a while.

Becca’s relationship with her parents has been somewhat strained; she always felt that her younger sister Pippa was the favoured one, who took up too much of her parents’ time. Pippa is married to a wealthy man and lives an apparently idyllic lifestyle, with young twin sons who are quite a handful at times, but adorable too.

Becca has also lost touch with Joe, but hears that he’s living nearby and working at a wine bar and restaurant. He had been training as a doctor, which was what his father wanted him to be, but his heart was never in it. However nobody really knew what Joe was thinking, and he’s still rather a private person, despite now working in his dream job. I do admit to skimming the sections where Joe explains in some detail about wine tasting and origins, to a class he is teaching, a topic which didn’t interest me in the slightest.

There’s a slightly bizarre mystical side to this book, involving voices from people no longer alive - it’s treated in a fairly pragmatic way, and it adds to the story; at first I thought it was supposed to be a vivid imagination, but Becca learns things she could not otherwise have known. So perhaps it was just a clever device to allow her to uncover some issues, but I could never quite believe in it.

The ending is entirely satisfactory, albeit a bit puzzling: one character is about to fly to Australia but then appears not to go without any explanation. And the epilogue, supposedly six months later, refers to a child as a year younger than he must have been in the previous chapter.

They’re minor gripes. Overall, I found this a very engaging story, with likeable people and even some spots of low-key humour here and there. It’s a gentle book about families and romantic relationships, tinged with poignancy. The writing is excellent, with realistic conversations and the main characters are quite three-dimensional. The way Becca starts to resolve the problems with her own family feels believable and encouraging, and I liked the way that her sister, too, starts showing some vulnerability.

Definitely recommended if you like women’s fiction with some quite important issues covered.

Review copyright 2021 Sue's Book Reviews