Clover’s Child by Amanda Prowse @MrsAmandaProwse

Book Description:

From the million-copy bestseller Amanda Prowse, the queen of heartbreak fiction.
Amanda Prowse is the author of The Coordinates Of Loss and the no.1 bestsellers Perfect Daughter, My Husband’s Wife and What Have I Done?

When eighteen-year-old Dot meets Sol, she feels that love has arrived at last. Solomon Arbuthnott is a man who can bring colour and warmth to her drab life in sixties London – and what’s more, he is a young, handsome soldier with excellent prospects. Someone who wants to give her everything she has dreamed of. Someone who can promise her blue skies, laughter, sun and always, always love.

And for a while, life is truly like a song. They stroll hand-in-hand by the Serpentine, dance cheek-to-cheek in Soho’s smoky bars, and begin to plan their idyllic future, growing old together in Sol’s ancestral home on the island of St Lucia.

But this is 1961. East End girls don’t date West Indian boys, let alone fall in love with them and leave the country. They stay at home and live the life their parents planned for them. Even if it leaves them lonelier than they ever thought possible. Even if it rips their heart in two…

My Thoughts:

Dot has her whole life ahead of her, full of hopes and dreams. I loved her carefree nature and her friendship with her best friend Barb when we first meet her. Her home life whilst they may not have much, is one that is comforting and happy and I loved the banter between the family.

When Dot meets Sol, the reader gets swept up in the romance between the pair. With Sol being West Indian and the story being set in the 1960’s, I was praying that everyone would be as happy as I was about this union but it soon becomes apparent they aren’t. If anything it was Clover’s own parents whose attitudes I was most shocked at, having loved this couple from meeting them, seeing how they put the feelings of others and what they would think before their own daughter’s happiness, it literally broke my heart. Seeing people’s attitudes back then was hard to stomach. More so when there are hate crimes and racism still very much around in the here and now.

Whilst there are some parts that made my blood boil within the story, there was also so much to love. A certain recording artist and song will be forever in my heart and I have no doubts that whenever I hear that song it will remind me of Sol and Dot.

Clover’s Child is a story of impossible choices and how those decisions shape the person we become. You would think a story of true love would be one of the fairy tales we were brought up on where everyone lives happily ever after. This is a stark reminder though of the real world we live in and how life has it’s ups and downs. The ending was left a little open for me as I love everything wrapped up nicely but then my heart had been captured by these characters and I wasn’t ready to leave them behind when I turned the last page. An emotional page turner that will pull on your heart strings!