Friday 10 April 2015

All the Dark Secrets by Jennie Felton 

I begged the author and her publisher constantly for a copy of this book and boy am I glad I did!! The author also writes under the name of Amelia Carr and I have read most of her books and loved them so I knew I would feel the same about this one. 

All the Dark Secrets is the first novel in a series, mostly about the Donovan family who live in a mining community in a row of houses where the majority of the men in the family work down the pit. Maggie Donovan is the only daughter of Patrick and Rose and she has 3 brothers. Billy is her youngest brother and I really fell in love with his character, as he was so gentle and sensitive, but always getting picked on by the other boys in the street.

Sometimes with family sagas you can get confused as there seem to be a lot of characters, but the author expertly explains who each character is and I totally admired Maggie and could just imagine what she looked like with her dark hair and “Irish eyes”!

Sometimes with books if there is a dark, nasty character, it makes me really anxious (but I think that is extremely good as it means the author has done a good job in describing what the character is like!!) and this book was no exception! Reuben is a spoilt, selfish, nasty, manipulative (need I go on!!!) excuse of a man and it made my heart race whenever I was reading about what he was getting up to, but I loved the suspense of it all!


This book has everything a family saga should have – happiness, extreme sadness, love, death, births etc but above all it was a real page turner and even though I am not a particularly fast reader, I read it in a couple of days. The only thing now is that I will have to wait until September for the next instalment which will be called The Miner’s Daughter. Thank you Jennie for writing such a wonderful book. The only down side now is that I am having a serious book hangover!! 

*****

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