RATING: GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
I enjoyed the book and how history shaped the way Bridie was. What I didn’t fully understand is why Polly got so upset when she discovered that Sara was Bridie’s daughter. I can see that she felt jealous because her sister grew up with her mother even though she didn’t know. But then I can’t understand how two teenagers decide that Bridie’s father was a victim of a miscarriage of justice just by reading a couple of articles.
When Sara returns to the house with Bridie, and Nuala tells her that Polly is gone. She popped out for some errand, and when she checked on her, Polly was not in the room. Sara and Nuala start looking everywhere and they even called the police. Then when Sara spots Young Joe, she knows where her sister is. When she asks Joe, he tells her that he ferried Polly across the river, and then Sarah finds Polly drowned.
The day of the funeral Sara does not know if Bridie really understands what is going on. She mentions a few words about a shirt and a mark, and we discover from Bridie’s jumbled memories that she is thinking about Quentin and the day she got pregnant. There is a twist because the man who made love to her was not Quentin, but Mark. Bridie had drunk too much, and since he was wearing the shirt Quentin had on at the restaurant, she thought it was him. However, she touched his head where she knew that Quentin had a mark from the attack when he was in the army. Bridie knew that she could have said something and stopped Mark, but she was confused and she liked his touch. So in reality, Sara is Mark’s daughter, and therefore, Polly’s sister. This is the reason why she felt so ashamed and even intended to leave her baby at the children’s home despite Nicholas’s offer. It was Nicholas who went to find her and made her keep the baby.
During Polly’s funeral Sara is approached by a woman who says that her sister came to talk to her friend, Dorothy, many years ago. Dorothy is the girl who identified Jack as the man who she saw before the bomb went off. Sara agrees to talk to Dorothy, and the woman, who is now blind after being injured during the Blitz, tells Sara that Polly and Michael were convinced that Jack was innocent and they wanted to prove it for Bridie. Dorothy says that she has regretted her testimony all her life. Back then she found out that a series of coincidences had involved Jack in the bombing. The week before he had been inquiring about some flats in a street where some terrorists had been living. Apart from that, he had an uncle who had been involved with the IRA, and Jack had wrote to him, but the uncle was just an old man. Dorothy even hired a detective to find out the truth and clear Jack’s name, but it was useless.
Some days later Bridie tells Sara to have a look at the music box that had belonged to her sister, and Sara finds a CD that her sister had recorded the day she decided to kill herself. On the CD Polly tells Sara that she had decided to leave life because she couldn’t let Bridie see her in that condition. She also tells her that she loves her, and she has always been her little sister even after she left. Polly says that she is leaving Sara her part of the house and enough money to cover insurance tax, and she says that maybe she could live there and use the money to hire live-in help so that Bridie doesn’t have to live in a nursing home.
The last chapter of the book shows Sara and Nuala taking Bridie to Coventry. Things are very different from 1939 when the bombing took place. Bridie enjoys the day, and Sara is not sure how much her mind registers. The novel ends in a very sweet note, when Bridie turns to Sarah and says that she is enjoying the day with Nuala and her lovely daughter. This is the first time that Bridie has called her ‘daughter’, and Sara feels most happy.
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