FAMILY MISFORTUNES REVEALED IN GRIPPING DRAMA
HOW IT WAS ★★★★ by Janet Ellis Two Roads, £16.99
YOU can choose your friends, as the old saying goes. But you can’t choose your family. And who would choose a family like the Deacons?
When we first meet Marion Deacon, she is in a hospital bathroom reapplying make-up before returning to her husband Michael’s bedside. He is terminally ill. She is chillingly dispassionate. “I don’t want him to die but I wish he’d get on with it,” she remarks.
Marion has brought photograph albums and letters to the hospital.As she sits by his bed and looks through them, memories of the past 40 years emerge and expose a story of family secrets and twisted, broken relationships.
“My scars, wounds and welts are concealed below my skin,” says Marion.
Marion, Michael, their 14-year-old daughter Sarah and seven-year-old son Eddie live an unremarkable life in Kent. However, Marion is bored. She resents her husband and has a complicated queasiness about Sarah growing up.
One day she finds Sarah’s diary, giving her an inside track into her daughter’s thoughts and, once she starts reading it, she finds she cannot stop.
Sarah, for her part, dislikes her mother and seems to enjoy taunting her little brother cruelly, just because she can.
This toxic undercurrent bubbles below the surface until Marion embarks on an affair, setting off a chain of events that pushes the family to breaking point.
Is Marion really as callous as she seems or has she learned through bitter experience that the only way to survive is to bury her emotions so deeply that she feels nothing?
How It Was is the second novel from former Blue Peter presenter Janet
Ellis. It is a gripping family drama and while its central character Marion is self absorbed and cold, as the story unfolds, we find out why.
The narrative moves between different times and different narrators, making it slightly disjointed, and Marion is such an intriguing character that I’d have been happy to hear the story from her perspective alone.
However, this is an engrossing read about a family in crisis from a talented writer.
Ellis is particularly perceptive about the often complex relationships between women, especially mothers and daughters.
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