A review by katdid
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

3.0

This was a bit disappointing after The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, but to be fair almost anything would be. I wasn’t really invested in either storyline, except to say that I did quite like Elina and would have liked to know more about her.
SpoilerI was kind of disturbed, in reading, how Ted was kind of obsessed with holding onto her and seemed to treat impregnating her as a way of binding her to him, but after you find out that Lexie was his mum and he’s repressed all memory of her and her death it makes sense from a psychology perspective I suppose.
I dunno; I just felt that Lexie’s story — while O’Farrell really nailed the idioms of speech, I thought, and was great at setting a scene — was kind of one-dimensional in a way, by which I think I mean almost… boring?