Jaffareadstoo....: 📖 Blog Tour ~ A Family Reunion by Patricia Scanlan

📖 Delighted to host today's stop on this lovely blog tour 📖

Simon&Schuster
4 March 2021

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book
and to Random Things Tours for the invitation to be part of the blog tour

When four feisty women from the same family, get together at a family reunion, anything can happen...

Marie-Claire, betrayed by her partner Marc plans her revenge to teach him a lesson he will never forget. She travels from Toronto, home to Ireland, to the house of the Four Winds, for her great aunt Reverend Mother Brigid’s eightieth birthday celebrations. It will be a long-awaited reunion for three generations of family, bringing together her mother, Keelin and grandmother, Imelda - who have never quite got along. And then all hell breaks loose.

Bitter, jealous Imelda makes a shocking revelation that forces them all to confront their pasts, admit mistakes, and face the truths that have shaped their lives. With four fierce, opinionated women in one family, will they ever be able to forgive the past and share a future? And what of Marc? It’s never too late to make amends…or is it?

📖 My Thoughts..

Reverend Mother Brigid is about to celebrate her eightieth birthday at her beloved Four Winds in Ireland and a planned family reunion will bring together three generations of her Irish family. This group of strong women each have a powerful story to tell and their meeting will have far reaching repercussions for all of them.

I think what this author does so well is create a very believable set of characters and interweaves their lives in such a way that you can't help but be drawn into their individual stories. Throughout the course of A Family Reunion we learn about the lives of Brigid, and her sister Imelda, and the complicated reasons for the animosity they level at each other. We also get to meet Keelin, Imelda's daughter who lives in France along with Imelda’s beloved granddaughter, Marie-Claire, who is escaping an unhappy love affair in Canada.

A Family Reunion is a complex family drama which looks at some fairly deep emotional issues but does so with a lovely, easy style which makes the book so engrossing that the pages turn almost by themselves. The story is long, coming in at over 500 pages, but is so fascinating that once I started reading I didn't notice time passing. I loved being caught up in the lives of Brigid, Imelda, Keelin and Marie-Claire and looked forward to the chapters where the author gave each of them their own time in the spotlight.

The birthday party which brings them together acts as the catalyst which will allow all the threads of the story to come together. Moving seamlessly forwards and backwards in time this multi-generational family drama captures the mood of Ireland throughout some of its most tumultuous times, and brings an awareness of some of the deep religious and social divides which affected the well-being of women during the 1950s, through to the present time.

With fascinating detail A Family Reunion delves deep into the heart of the Dunne family, exposing secrets so raw, that they threaten to expose the shadows of the past and which also have deep consequences for the future stability of the family.

*It’s worth noting that this book was previously issued as The Liberation of Brigid Dunne.

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