‘Nowhere,’ I reply. ‘I’m from nowhere.’
‘Everyone’s from somewhere,’ he says.
‘Not me,’ I reply silently.
Clemency Smittson was adopted as a baby and the only connection she has to her birth mother is a cardboard box hand-decorated with butterflies. Now an adult, Clem decides to make a drastic life change and move to Brighton, where she was born. Clem has no idea that while there she'll meet someone who knows all about her butterfly box and what happened to her birth parents.
As the tangled truths about her adoption and childhood start to unravel, a series of shocking events cause Clem to reassess whether the price of having contact with her birth family could be too high to pay...
Review: this was an interesting one for me, I actually started this book quite a while ago but I couldn't get into it so I downloaded the audio book and started it again. I'm glad I stuck with it because the issues that this books deals with are nothing like I have faced in my own life and are so wide-ranging and vast that I feel I learnt things from this novel. It was quite tough-going at points but I am glad that I stuck with it! This books covers the topics of divorce, infidelity, assisted suicide, adoption, racism, sexism and also what to do when you've found the perfect coffee shop but can't go there anymore-that last one I could empathise with!
The manin character of this novel was adopted as a baby and knows nothing of her birth mother. A chance encounter changes that for her and we get to see how it all unravels. I really struggled to relate to Clemency and so I found her very hard to like or bond with. I think this did affect my enjoyment of the books, but the book is so much more than just a bout her.the others characters in the novel we're similarly dispositioned and so I didn't develop an affinity with any of them in particular. The owner of the aforementioned coffee shop was the person I liked the most and I struggled to get along with the others to be honest.
As I said though this book is about so much more than them. I found it really interesting to hear how Clem was affected by her adoption and by everything else that followed. Her relationship with her mother and her birth mother are really interesting and as that unravelled, that was the real story for me. She is also a small business owner and so the struggles with that and also with living and setting up in a new city were much easier for me to get along with. I thought that Dorothy Koomson dealt with these issues incredibly well and I would be really interested in reading more books by this author in the future!
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