Family Saga

I did enjoy this book. It's about Claire, a young woman who has an unhappy - and mystifying - end to a teenage crush on Jonas, the boy next door, as the story opens. We then flash back to her childhood, when her widowed mother first meets her stepfather Leo.

The structure is slightly confusing - each chapter has a heading giving the month and year, which vary from 1980 - when Claire is ten - to 2006 when she's a young wife, helping her American husband run a restaurant. This didn't always flow as well as I would have liked, although the flashbacks helped to fill in the story in a way that gradually gave a good picture of Claire's life.

Leo is a delightful character, and I very much enjoyed his friendship with Claire and her mother. However he has two children, a little older than Claire, who are most unpleasant types; I found them rather too nasty, not just as jealous, selfish children (not wishing their father to re-marry at all) but as grasping, bitter adults. It was hard to believe that anyone could be quite so vicious.

The writing is good, most of the people well-rounded and interesting, and the plot quite exciting; I was eagerly awaiting the resolution of the mystery posed in the first chapter, and pleased with a satisfying resolution. All in all, an excellent book.

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This was a good book but could have been better by not making me jump around from past to present. I felt like each time I went back to continue it I had to review where I was and which time period I should be imagining. :( ( )