Becky's Great Book Reviews A Family Matter by Claire Lynch

It's rare when a book is so good I finish it in one day. With Claire Lynch's A Family Matter, I sat right down at the library and devoured about a quarter of it right then and there. By 8:30 that night I was done but didn't want to be.

In 2022, Heron (nicknamed from Henry) is dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis. His daughter, Maggie, and family don't know yet because Heron feels as if telling her will make it real. Maggie is everything to Heron because he raised her alone.

The timeline jumps back to 1982 when Maggie was three, and the story unfolds as to what happened to Maggie's mother. Dawn was twenty-three years old, married, with three-year-old Maggie. When she meets new-to-town Hazel, Dawn feels as though she has finally met her closest friend and confidant. The two quickly become everything to one another; and then it develops into more than a friendship. When Dawn works up the courage to tell Heron what she deep-down knew all along, she thinks (hopes) that they can split amicably and share the raising of Maggie.

However, a rather guileless and acquiescent Heron seeks legal counsel, and is advised to cut Dawn out of their lives permanently. It's explained to Heron that pulling Dawn and Maggie apart would be the best course of action, to save Maggie from being raised with this "perversion" in her life. Heron is told that it would "turn" Maggie that way. In the author's notes, Claire Lynch explains that this was not uncommon in the family courts of England at the time.

Dawn fights to get back into her daughter's life over the years but is kept away. Maggie grows up thinking her mom up and left them for another man and it's never discussed.

At one point Dawn thinks "It had been the work of a lifetime, learning to live with what she had lost". In 2022 when Maggie learns the truth and finds her mother again, times have changed. Dawn ponders over the fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, "all that might gift you or cost you".

The beauty of this narrative is in the character development, the poignancy of each character wrestling with what they think or know to be right. Claire Lynch deftly brings us into their psyches and makes readers sympathetic with each involved. A Family Matter is exquisitely written in its simple yet impactful prose. This novel gets a resounding five stars out of five.