Sunday 20 July 2014

Book Review: A SIXPENNY SONG BY JENNIFER JOHNSTON


My thoughts on this moving story .....

A SIXPENNY SONG
BY
JENNIFER JOHNSTON


Published ~~ Tinder Press
Published ~~ Oct 2013
Pages ~~ 194  (Paperback)



Synopsis ~~

Annie's father is dead. She isn't sorry. A rich and domineering man, he was always more passionate about money than the happiness of his wife and child. And when his lovely, fragile wife Jude died in mysterious circumstances when Annie was still very young, her father sent her to school in England, and tried to ensure that Jude was never mentioned again.

Now, at last, his days of tyranny are over. And so Annie leaves London and goes back to Dublin, to the house in which he lived and her mother died, where she makes the first of several startling discoveries: he has left her the house she hated. Now, just when she thought she was free of him, she is expected to make a new life in Ireland, and live as he would have wished. Does she dare to defy him one more time? And who will be able to tell her the truth about her mother's life, and death, before she has to decide?



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My Thoughts ~~

When Annie comes back home to Dublin she is met by Miriam, 'Mrs Number Two Wife', as Annie called her father's widow, who, soon afterwards, takes all the furniture from the house Annie has inherited.  

Annie is not sorry he's dead.

She hadn't really liked him very much, Dada (he preferred it if she called him father: to him Dada was an untidy name for a man of his standing).He liked things to go his way; his word was law, and always what he thought was the best for you.'I only want what is best for you.'How many times had she heard those unanswerable words?And now he was dead.  She wondered if he had ordered his death as he had ordered everything else in his life.


Annie plans to sell her father's house and open a bookshop in the small village but as she talks to Kevin, the odd job man, and his elderly aunt she discovers secrets but are they all lies or are they telling her the truth?

A moving family drama, with very few characters and an interesting storyline. Overall I enjoyed it but I thought the story was too short, I felt there was more that the author could have told us and I felt as if I didn't really know the characters very well.

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Available to buy from ~~

BookDepository.com  (free shipping worldwide)

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Source:  Thanks to the Publishers and Bookbridgr


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