Not the best of Joanna Trollope’s books.

(I seem to have thought all of the last handful of books I’ve read to be not as good as others by the same author so this is quite possibly me just not being in a good reading mode rather than all these authors being not in good writing mode.)

I thought there were a lot of interesting themes and issues raised but none of them got explored properly and the characters weren’t fleshed out enough to make the story worth it without the themes. The book wasn’t long enough to tell the characters stories properly. The Charleston family, grandmother Sarah, mother Martha and granddaughters Gillon (“the girl from the South”) and Ashley would have populated a good book by themselves. And the London contingient could also have populated a book though I don’t think it would have been as interesting a book. And whilst the intermingling of these two sets of characters is fun it all feels rather superficial. I felt like I didn’t really get to the heart of the matter.