Every month or so, if it’s not too hot I visit the local church book sale and often pick up a selection of interesting-looking books. I’m always prepared to try new authors for 50 cents, and if I don’t think I’ll read a book again, I return it a month or two later. I had heard of Sophie King before I spotted her book ‘Mums@Home’, but had never read any of her novels. I bought the book about six months ago, and picked it up to read a few days ago. Apparently it was republished under the name 'Love is a Secret'.
I found the early chapters a tad confusing, as there are four main characters, each of them introduced separately. Their link is that they join a community website called “Mums@Home’ - a kind of early experiment on social media, perhaps; this book was published in 2006 so inevitably some of the technology feels a bit dated.
Caroline is one of the main characters. She’s married to the rather dull Roger, and hasn’t yet forgiven him for having an affair a couple of years previously. They have a 19-year-old daughter, Annabel, who is travelling around the world during her gap year, and Caroline worries when she hasn’t heard from her in a while. They also have an 18-year-old son Ben who is in the throes of A-levels, and a younger teenage daughter, Georgie, who is keen on rugby. Caroline works part-time for a magazine.
Susan is a single mother to 12-year-old Tabitha, who has quite severe cerebral palsy. Tabitha goes to a day centre which is threatened with closure, and rarely sees her father… until he turns up, unexpectedly, with a new wife in tow. The wife seems to have reformed him, and wants him to be involved in his daughter’s life, but Susan isn’t sure if she can trust them to take proper care of Tabitha, although she’s desperately in need of a break.
Lisa is the most annoying character; she wants everyone to know about her pregnancy, and thinks she knows all about parenting. She has had a hard life, and two miscarriages, so she’s inevitably nervous, but she becomes obsessive about routines and is convinced that all badly behaved children have parents who don’t treat them right. She is very good with small children, and works part time at a community centre, but she’s extremely judgemental on the mums@home website.
And then there’s Mark, whose wife is away for five months, and who is trying to juggle working full-time at home with his two children, Florrie who’s 12 and Ed who’s 11. They squabble and download unsuitable things on his computer, and Ed has started kicking people, and becoming very angry and uncommunicative. Mark doesn’t think he would be welcomed on the forum, so he adopts a female persona.
The action switches rapidly between each of the four main characters and their families, and although their situations are all very different, there isn’t much depth of characterisation, so at first i had to keep referring back to see who was whom. Gradually I sorted them out in my mind, and I thought the writing was good, with just the right pace to keep me interested.
At times it was difficult to put down, as I was intrigued to know what would happen to each of the people concerned. It became clear that each of them was hiding something, including some things which weren’t revealed until later in the book. Inevitably some of them meet, and discover their shared interest in the same site. But it’s done well, and while it’s perhaps a coincidence that all four of them lived reasonably close to each other, and that they all joined the site around the same time, the circumstances of the meetings felt entirely believable. Mark and Caroline meet in a work situation, and in a sense Susan and Lisa do too.
I’m not quite sure what it was that made me kept reading, unless it was the many different strands of the plot which the author handled well, so that it wasn’t too difficult to keep track of the story once I’d managed to remember who everyone was. But it was disappointing that I didn’t care much about any of the main characters. I like to be able to relate to at least one significant person in a novel, and none of them felt three-dimensional, nor did they seem to have anything much in common with me, even though I took part in similar forums myself twenty or so years ago.
Overall it was a good read, with some quite serious issues covered, including the question of how much to tell one’s children, and what they can handle.
Recommended if you like women’s fiction with plenty of story rather than great characterisation.
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