Thank you, Bookouture, for inviting me to take part in Kerry Fisher’s blog tour today for ‘Another Woman’s Child’, and for supplying me with an ARC. Here is my review:
Could you take in your best friend’s child, even if it risked destroying your own family?
Jo had thought that her life – and her heart – was full. With a busy job, a husband and a teenage daughter who is going off the rails, keeping her life running smoothly had already felt hard enough.
But now Jo sits at the funeral of her best friend Ginny, crushed by the loss of a friendship that had endured for thirty years: from college and their first days at work through to settling down and raising their own children.
Against her husband’s wishes, Jo has made a life-changing decision: to take in Ginny’s teenage son Victor and raise him as her own. Despite her misgivings, Jo feels she had no choice: Ginny was a single parent and Victor had no other family who could take care of him.
But Victor’s arrival is about to break open the fragile cracks that were already forming on the surface of Jo’s family life and in her small rural community… and expose a secret that has remained hidden for many years, with devastating consequences.
What does TWG think?
What a good question; ‘Could you take in your best friend’s child, even if it risked destroying your own family?’
Could you? But then again, could you answer that honestly, without even being in the situation? Now, if someone asked me whether I would take in my best friends child, without the addition of the last sentence, I would say yes in a heartbeat. Who knows, it could destroy my own family, then again, it may not. To call this situation complex would be an understatement but, just like everything else in the world, there is a lot more to any situation that meets the eye.
Jo and Ginny were best friends for many years. Their friendship stood the test of the stormy seas….literally, until one day, their friendship was severed due to the unfortunate death of Ginny. But is the tie truly severed? Ginny, before she died, asked Jo to take in her son, 17 year old Victor. Jo was adamant that she was going to do that one thing for Ginny, despite having a tearaway, misunderstood child of her own, young Phoebe. Like I said at the very beginning of this review, there is a lot more to a situation than what anyone realises, and Jo’s situation is no different.
Look, I cant really sit here and judge a teenager on her antics all because I never stooped to that level when I was a teenager, however I was really shocked by how Phoebe acted, as wrll as the ways in which Jo and Patrick responded. Im not a perfect parent, nor have I had the pleasure of parenting a teenager….yet, so i probably don’t have a right to pass comment on the way that Phoebe is being parented. I was just really blindsided by those actions.
Speaking of being blindsided, when Victor came into the family so much schnitzel went down it was madness! Racism was a topic of conversation, as was blended families, loyalties, grief, relationships, drugs, alcohol…..you name it, it was probably discussed in this book. Im not saying that in a negative manner either because all of the topics were given an equal amount of time in the spotlight to manifest throughout the book.
I really do enjoy reading a Kerry Fisher novel because of the way she discusses real life situations in an honest and impressionable manner. I do feel like there was a lot in this storyline to focus on and at times that made me feel a little bit overwhelmed as everything in the storyline deserved my attention equally, and I couldn’t give that.
I enjoyed the complexity of the storyline and the uniqueness of what the book was centered around as it certainly gave me food for thought until the very end. I found the varying family dynamics such an interesting concept and it added brilliant depths to an already multi layered read.
Whilst ‘Another Woman’s Child’ seemed different to the usual Kerry Fisher novels I have grown to know and love, I still really appreciated the thought provoking story telling and the insightful, memorable novel that I really enjoyed.
The Writing Garnet 