“The Hand That First Held Mine” by Maggie O’Farrell

I’ve been impressed with Maggie O’Farrell ever since I read After You’d Gone and haven’t been disappointed by anything of hers that I’ve read . . . until now. Ok, maybe that’s a bit more harsh than necessary, because I still ended up enjoying the reading experience. It just wasn’t up to the standard that I’ve come to expect.

I think the problem was the characters. They just didn’t seem real to me. The more developed characters floated just outside the realm of believability, and the rest seemed amorphous and faceless. (Except for the babies! I could vividly picture their movements and behavior.) This had the unfortunate consequence of failing to make me care about any of the characters in the book, which means the occasional tragedy seemed like little more than a blip. 

This is one of those parallel stories (half of the plot is in the past, half in present day) with two completely different sets of characters (well, for the most part; the whole point of the book is the slow reveal of how the two stories are interlinked.) Plot A centers on Lexie Sinclair and begins on the cusp of her escape from her mundane post-war life in the English countryside. She shocks her family and moves to London and then has jobs and is slightly immoral and blah blah blah. Plot B is about Ted and Elina and their new baby and how difficult parenthood is, mostly for Elina at first, but then moreso for Ted. I won’t tell you how the two plots are linked because that would  just be mean, but I will say... if you read a more detailed blurb about the book and then have a guess, you’ll be right.