My real children

by

390 pages

English language

Published Feb. 17, 2015 by WF Howes Ltd.

ISBN:
978-1-5100-0972-1
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
925490592

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4 stars (3 reviews)

The day Mark called, Patricia Cowan's world split in two. The phone call. It is 2015 and Patricia Cowan is very old. 'Confused today' read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War - those things are solid in her memory. Then that phone call and her memory splits in two. She was Trish, a housewife and mother of four. She was Pat, a successful travel writer and mother of three. She remembers living her life as both women, so very clearly. Which memory is real - or are both just tricks of time and light?

8 editions

reviewed My Real Children by Jo Walton

Review of 'My Real Children' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A hauntingly powerful and very evocative novel, this kept me awake until I'd finished it. It was very sad, on one level, seeing how different Pat's lives could have been, but so poignant and eloquently written that I almost felt as if I was reading something very sacrosanct and personal and private. The relationships depicted were solid and powerful, the glimpses of teens through to the very elderly excellent in their execution and each element - from Pat's father at the seaside, to her naivety at college, her complete subservience to her husband, her love of art and literature, her kids and grandchildren, her mother: each of these added nuanced layers to the work, and my head is still full of two of her lives and at the moment very little of my own.

Highly recommended.

avatar for ShelfMonkey

rated it

4 stars
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rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Interpersonal relations
  • Fiction
  • Life change events
  • Memory
  • Motherhood

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