I bought this book from Jeffrey’s Books in Malvern earlier this year. I happened to be in the area and did my usual and asked the lady for a recommendation. As always I explained about my aversion to romance and asked for an author local to the area or indigenous, or even both. She crushed it. This book is hard to read for those who have experienced the suicide of a loved one, or a mental illness. If you can deal with those hard topics then this book is a great insight into those topics. I also noticed some interesting tidbits of history.
It’s almost as if mental health issues are genetic. Three generations of schizophrenia in the one family. Sally’s aunt, herself and her only child. Maybe it’s only schizophrenia that’s genetic, but this is something that this book appears to illustrate. If a study has not been done on schizophrenia and genetics then this would be a very good starting point.
I loved this book. I found the writing style made it reasonably easy to read, although some of the details were heartbreaking. The historical aspects it highlighted would be very interesting for the younger generation.
It’s really hard to understand that my mother’s generation weren’t allowed to work in various occupations once they got married, or if they were allowed to continue working once married then they had to give up working once they gave birth. Many women lived ‘in sin’ and didn’t marry, or didn’t tell their employer they were married. This is mentioned briefly in this book.
Another historical aspect that is mentioned is ‘fault divorce’. Once upon a time if you wanted a divorce you had to get evidence of fault, such as the other party having an affair, in order to get a divorce. The divorce proceedings came after a really bad marriage. Her husband started off as a really nice person, but his true colours came through, Beavis put up with him for far too long. Beavis highlights the ‘fault divorce’ with her own divorce proceedings. Before she could apply for a divorce she needed evidence. She had to get a private detective in to get the evidence and then she needed a number of people to actually witness her husband sleeping with another woman.
It’s the mental health issues and the abuse through marriage issues discussed in this book are what make this book sing. Beavis doesn’t pull her punches and just takes us through the stories of both extremely large issues. By the end of the book all I wanted to do was give her a hug, commiserate with her on the loss of her son and celebrate with her for having found a really good man for her second husband. The book does finish on a high, but the lows are incredibly low.