Phoenix Book Reviews would like to thank John for his review
John Van der Kiste lives in Devon. A library assistant, former DJ and musician, he has written over twenty books, mostly historical or musical biographies, and reviewed records and books for national and local journals and fanzines.
Is Meg Oakley lucky or poor? She's in her mid-20s, more or less free, single and endearingly scatty, with a decent job waitressing at Best Bib & Tucker, giving her lots of time to party, go clubbing, get hideously drunk and get horizontal on occasion with wealthy local Jack The Lad, Jake Arundel. The only problem is that Jake is already engaged, and she knows her heart is going to get broken if she's not careful.
But while sneaking out from an early morning tryst, she meets local schoolmaster Matthew Potter. He is a lovely man, but still adjusting painfully to the lonely life of bringing up two small children after losing his wife, who died of cancer shortly after giving birth to the second. She begs him for a lift, immediately hits it off with little Freddy in the back, and does her best to try and jolly the morose Matthew up a bit. Until she suddenly realises that this is the first anniversary of his wife's death and he is bound to be feeling pretty down in the dumps.
So far so good. Meg is evidently a tart with a heart, a kind of surrogate mother to kid sister Pug and brother William, and on good terms on the whole with godmother and surrogate Mum Aggie. Despite the occasional faux pas with Matthew, she becomes friendly with him, Freddy and baby Georgie (Georgina), and does the odd spot of baby-sitting for him.
One of the funniest moments comes when she takes a telephone call for him in his absence from a snooty female whom she manages to upset, and whom she tells Freddy sounds like the Queen. Her name's Daphne, she tells Freddy. "What did Granny want?" he asks sleepily. Snooty mother-in-law. Oops! Once parents-in-law find out about this new woman sort-of in their son's life, they are pretty miffed.
Just when you think it's going to become one of those nice but frothy and rather insubstantial tales, reality kicks in. Her mother walked out on her and the siblings when she was fourteen, and Aggie has just told her that this same mother is dying. What is she to do, a tearful Meg asks Matthew. Go and see her before it's too late, otherwise you'll never forgive yourself, he says. He gives her a lift a couple of hundred miles up country, only for her to find by degrees that whatever she was told about her parents in the past (for example, her father who was supposed to have died in a motorbike accident a month before she was born) is plainly not true.
The author's debut, it won the Romantic Novelists' Association Newcomers' Award. It's a fun book in a lighthearted, escapist kind of way - a pleasant holiday read when you don't want something too demanding. At times some of the characters are so shallow that they hardly seem convincing, and the narrative tends to get a little flabby here and there. All the same, the portrayal of Matthew, his children and his censorious parents-in-law ring pretty true to life.
And above all, Meg the heroine turns out to be more than the dippy good-time girl she seems at first. For the first few chapters, I wasn't sure I really cared about her enough to finish the book, but the good humour and poignant moments gradually hooked me.
Publisher: Coronet
ISBN: 0340768010
Price: £5.99 p/b
Date reviewed: November 2002
John's Rating: 3.5/5
