Today it's my turn on the BlogTour The Forgotten Sister by Caroline Bond. It's a contemporary read, an emotive and hard-hitting one.
Caroline Bond was born in Scarborough and studied English at Oxford University before working as a market researcher for 25 years. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Leeds Trinity University, and lives in Leeds with her husband and three children. Her first novel, The Second Child, was published in 2018.
Follow @Bond2Caroline @CorvusBooks on Twitter, on Amazon,
Buy The Forgotten Sister
About the book
Cassie and Erin are sisters. They are close - in age, looks and personality - but there is one crucial difference: Cassie is adopted.
At seventeen, Cassie sets out to find her birth mother. She is hungry for the truth, but she discovers her adoption was far more complicated than even she could have imagined. In uncovering her birth identity Cassie learns that her adoptive parents have kept a terrible secret from her her whole life, a secret that now threatens to destroy everything she has ever held dear.
The Forgotten Sister is a heart-rending, profoundly moving novel about protecting the ones you love from the secrets that will hurt them most.
This is the story of a young girl called Cassie and her attempt to find out more about her past and her biological family. It's also a way of shining the spotlight on the inadequacies of an overburdened system and the children who get lost in the system.
In general a lot of people like to think that an adopted child or person should be eternally grateful, especially when they have been raised in a loving environment by their adopted parents. That there shouldn't be any questions about their lives before the adoption, because it looks as if they are betraying the new family. When the natural instinct to know who you are and where you come from arises, it can cause a lot of conflict.
It probably explains why Grace and Tom think their 17-year-old is just going through a difficult hormone induced period of difficulty. Her choice of men is dubious, she defies the rules and in general is quite combative. It doesn't even dawn on them that the problem could lie elsewhere.
The truth is Cassie wants to know more about herlife and family before life with Tom and Grace. She has been experiencing flashbacks that suggest there were moments of comfort, love and caring in between the more frightening ones. What does that mean? She really has so many questions.
For me the real crux of the issue is when Tom and Grace make a choice that determines the lives of not just their family, but also that of an isolated, abused and neglected child. How many people do that without a second thought, because dealing with a difficult child, well it is easier to just turn around and forget they ever existed, right?
Bond brings a couple of things to the table in this story; the complexity of adoption, the bond of sisterhood, despite a lack of blood bond or because there is one. The author also mixes, albeit it quite subtly the issue of race, skin colour, racism and colour bias into the story.
It's a complex mixture of emotions and the reader is invited into the great entanglement that exists in this small family. I can imagine opinions may be swayed on a few things, but that's not a bad thing. It's a contemporary read, an emotive and hard-hitting one. An eye-opener of a story.
Buy The Forgotten Sister at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Corvus; pub date 2 May 2019. Buy at Amazon com.
Thanks so much for this blog tour support Cheryl x
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