Another Home, Another Love by Gwen Kirkwood
| Another Home, Another Love by Gwen Kirkwood | |
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| Category: Women's Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: Set in rural Scotland in the seventies it's an easy and interesting read. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 224 | Date: May 2012 |
| Publisher: Robert Hale | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0709096306 | |
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Rosemary Palmer-Farr is nowhere near as grand as her name might lead you to expect. In fact she's a down-to-earth girl, fresh out of horticultural college who's taken over the gardens attached to her mother's hotel. It's her mother who has the social pretensions. She's determined that Rosemary Lavender (it's OK - everyone else calls her Rosie) is going to make a good marriage and that certainly doesn't include any of the tenant farmers (or their offspring) she's been so friendly with. And when push comes to shove she'll do whatever is necessary to keep her away from one particular man of the soil whilst pushing the suit of the local landowning family.
Actually, Rosie's priority isn't Sam - well certainly not at first. She's determined that she's going to get the gardens working properly and prove herself to be a good businesswoman. It's the seventies and women making it by their own efforts are still something of a novelty. And the sexual revolution of the sixties seems to have stuck in the cities and it certainly hasn't reached this part of rural Scotland. Reputations are ALL despite the arrival of The Pill.
Pay attention when you start reading this book as it seems to have a cast of thousands all trying to elbow their way onto the first page. You will sort them out. It helps if you realise that Rosie's mother, Catherine, wasn't a particularly motherly mother and much of the love and support she got as she was growing up came from the Caraford family - they're the tenant farmers and Rosie seems to have adopted their family as her own. Think of it as a big, reasonably happy community of dairy farmers and don't bother trying to sort out who's who too soon.
And something you'll quickly realise is that Gwen Kirkwood knows her dairy farming. There's a level of detail about how it works which could be tedious if it wasn't delivered with such a light touch - and wasn't so fascinating. She knows her farmers too - and the working men come of the page well. She's less sympathetic to the toffs - or those who think that's what they are - and some of them are two-dimensional, but it is a real pleasure to dislike them!
It's an easy reasonably undemanding read which I finished in one sitting. I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
If this book appeals then you'll also enjoy The Lonely Furrow by Pamela Kavanagh.
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