Joanna Trollope - Reviews

Reviews

Friday Nights:

For all the power careers, single parenthood and enduring ties of the sisterhood, Joanna Trollope shackles her story to men like a suffragette to a lamppost. The result is a light but insightful look at a rather conventional cast of characters.

Brothers and Sisters:

Though the characters seem very realistic, they are not fully developed, however. We learn about each one only what is needed for the author to illustrate the process of adoption and its myriad effects on the people involved in it. Her themes control all the action and the characters themselves, instead of having the action evolve naturally from the characters' personalities and interactions. But readers will be fascinated by this vivid domestic drama, the unusual subject, and the lively characters who bare their souls. When all have had their relationships tested and tempered, they and the reader come to new appreciations of what love really is.

Joanna Trollope's latest novel wades through the anguish of adoption, scooping up the pain of the adopted child, the agony of the birth mother and the insecurity of the adoptive parent along the way. If I was any one of the characters imprisoned in the murky jelly of this novel, I'd be straight on to the Adoption Agency, demanding to be re-settled with another creator. Joanna Trollope has a subject capable of making us weep at the tragedy and the loss, and yet what does she achieve? She so resolutely makes her characters emote to each other in a ghastly brand of unisex mush that I actually found myself blushing.