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(More customer reviews)BLACKTHORN WINTER by Sarah Challis
January 19, 2005
One of my favorite books read in 2004 was BLACKTHORN WINTER by Sarah Challis. I can't say enough about this novel. The characters, however, was the driving force behind this book, although the center of the story was Claudia Knight's life as she tried desperately to begin a new one in a village called Court Barron. She does everything including change her last name, in the hopes that her neighbors will not know who she is, or discover that her husband is Roger Baron, the man who was recently sent to jail for a financially related crime.
While Claudia does her best to start a new life as a single woman, she also has to deal with her two adult children. Her daughter continues to defend Roger, even though he's in jail and has also had an affair with a woman he would rather be with than his own wife. Her son is in India and emotionally and physically is as far from Claudia as he will ever get. She does have a true friend in her sister-in-law Minna, who supports Claudia through phone conversations and communications through the lawyer, David.
Hiding her true story from the neighbors is a 24-hour job. She doesn't know how long she can keep up this charade, especially with the newspapers that often cover Roger's story on the front page. As she builds a new life for herself, she slowly gets to know the neighbors, and the story unfolds. Challis does a great job developing the characters and their various relationships, and it is the relationships and the personalities that make BLACKTHORN WINTER a delight to read.
This book is highly recommended by the Ratmammy.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Blackthorn Winter
In April, when blackthorn blossom clothes the hedgerows like a wedding veil, there sometimes comes a spell of frost or snow so severe that it seems as if spring and summer will never return. This is what country people call a blackthorn winter. For Claudia Barron, the blackthorn winter of that particular April is like a metaphor for her whole life: for the end of glamour, financial security and marriage. Her rich and powerful husband has been sent to prison, leaving her homeless and virtually penniless. Hopeless to cling to the remnants of her old life, pointless to stand by a man who has betrayed her in almost every way a man can betray a woman. Instead she goes into hiding, buys the only house she can afford in the Dorset village of Court Barton - a hideous bungalow built in an old kitchen garden - and changes her name. Under a cloak of anonymity she sets out to get herself a job in the local school. But villages don't much like anonymity and before very long Claudia finds herself drawn into the gossip and the grumbling, the lives and loves and quarrels of Court Barton in a way that she had never expected. Blackthorn winters do always give way to spring in the end.
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