Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Review of Daughters for a Time by Jennifer Handford

Daughters for a Time
Jennifer Handford
Amazon Publishing
ISBN13: 9781612182926
283 pages

Helen and her husband Tim own a successful DC eatery, they’re a couple that seem to have it all until you look below the surface. Helen has survived her childhood, her fear of rejection and inadequacy, her mother’s death from Ovarian Cancer and her father’s desertion only by the steady hand of her older sister Claire. But even Claire has managed to get the one thing that Helen so desperately wants, a child of her own. As Helen struggles with infertility drugs and cycles, adoption is mentioned more than once, but Helen can’t seem to get her head around not having her own. But the more she examines the brochures about all the abandoned girls in China, some left on roads only days old she feels her heart begin to melt and after a last failed attempt at pregnancy she and Tim set out on a journey to bring home a daughter not of their blood but of their heart.  Helen is in for all kinds of surprises when she returns home with her new little girl and some of them won’t be easy to take, will she be able to handle the good with the bad, or will the ghosts of her past haunt her future as well.

Jennifer Handford’s debut novel Daughters for a Time is a poignant, beautiful and at times heartbreaking read. Her plot could be any town, any house USA where the inhabitants battle their infertility and what to do about it, but she gave me a little more as well as she brings to light the real problem of Chinese girl children being abandoned, in fact up to a million children are abandoned in China each year and the majority of them are healthy baby girls. Her dialogue is easy to read and I found it hard to put the novel down. Her characters are at times funny, at times sad and at times frustratingly bullheaded but they all seemed very real to me. There are a couple of things that set this novel apart from being just a piece of fiction, the moral is very real and the relationship between the sisters is spot-on. This novel will appeal to a multitude of readers, from romance lovers, family drama fans, to literary fiction enthusiasts. And if they’re like me they’ll all come away with the satisfaction of having read something that spoke to their heart.
Ms. Handford I look forward to our next journey together as this one was exceptional
Buy the book here visit the author's website here



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