This post is part of a blog tour. Thank you to Random Things Tours and Bedford Square Publishers for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Mairéad lives a busy life in London as the head of an influencer agency, which she recently sold to a large conglomerate, giving her the financial freedom to buy a home and decorate it in her dream style. She’s suffering dating fatigue from being on the apps too long, struggling to feel relevant at work where an increasingly young workforce see her as old, and feels the pressure to constantly be ‘on’ in a world of endless notifications. When her estranged sister Lenny has an accident and is unable to care for her daughter Sunny while she recuperates in hospital, suddenly Mairéad’s carefully curated life feels like it’s falling apart at the seams. Lenny and Sunny live off-grid in a cabin in Wales, believe medicine to be poison, and try to live ferociously eco-consciously. When Sunny arrives in London she struggles with the busy-ness, the noise, the choice, the waste. She just wants to spend her time reading, and eventually bonds with the goats at the zoo and wants to spend every waking moment there. Mairéad is at a loss how to cope. She never wanted children, doesn’t know how to look after them, and just wants her beautiful, clean life to return to normal. She hopes to palm Sunny off on her reclusive, tech-obsessed mother, in a house full of eccentric lodgers, but her conscience soon gets the better of her and she realises that she’s the only one who is going to at least try to take proper care of Sunny.
Due to her financial windfall she is able to take some time out of work when she realises it’s completely untenable to try to do both. A disastrous attempt at taking Sunny to work followed by a failed attempt at recruiting a temporary babysitter open her eyes to just how much time raising a child takes. Sunny is comparatively low-maintenance. She is used to having very little and either wants to have her nose in a book or be communing with whatever animals are nearby. She struggles with busy shops and with social niceties however, making it difficult for Mairéad to do simple tasks like food shopping. We see Mairéad begin to crumble under the pressure, unbelievably bored shackled to her niece, yet with time she realises that she has become quite attached and feels something missing when they are apart. A summer holiday orchestrated by her friend Dodie leads her in contact with many more children and young people and her maternal instincts begin to come alive, although she continues to worry whether she’s doing the right things. She’s impressed by Sunny’s confidence in the water and tries to step out of her comfort zone to meet her halfway. There is no magic moment where everything becomes easy but they work together through the difficulties to find a way of living that works for them.
We don’t see much of Lenny directly, merely learn about her through her absence, in the small anecdotes Sunny tells, and in the brief encounters at the hospital and back at the cabin. It is clear that Mairéad has had a difficult family life. As a child she felt a bond with her sister, an equal witness to the particularities of their family life, but as she got older and became involved in eco-terrorism they grew apart. Lenny dreamed of living in a commune in Canada but her pregnancy put paid to those hopes as children were not welcome. When she blows up at Mairéad for having taken their late father to chemotherapy treatment their relationship is irreparably damaged and they no longer speak. Her mother Helen makes constant excuses to avoid her, has never seen Mairéad’s flat and never expects to. She pretends to be willing to help with Sunny but when it comes to it she refuses. It’s clear that even as children they had to battle with the lodgers for attention, and since the rise of smart technology Helen is always distracted, putting her phone or laptop before listening to her daughter. This dysfunctional family life adds to Mairéad’s anxieties about being able to care for Sunny, but it’s clear to the reader that although she goes through the struggles that will be familiar to anyone looking after a child, her heart is in the right place and that they’ll be OK.
The narrative style is relaxed and informal, and you feel so much that you’re seeing events through Mairéad’s eyes that it is somewhat jarring every time she is referred to in the third person, which remains the narrative style throughout. The story felt a little far-fetched, not because of Sunny’s need for a guardian, but because Mairéad is so able to simply drop her life, to move to a cabin in the wilds of Wales and accepts this as her lot. She completely lets Sunny guide their life, not even considering that they could move into a home with modern amenities nearby so as not to remove Sunny from the life and landscape she knows, but to make her own life less difficult. They also seem to come around to each other very quickly, from complete discontent to quiet understanding, and Sunny gets used to the comforts of Mairéad’s life without too much complaint after her initial surprise at this luxurious way of living. Nonetheless, it’s a nice enough read, with characters put in a situation that would feel impossible to resolve in real life. Walker acknowledges this in resisting a happy ever after moment. We see Mairéad grow into her role, albeit with a few bumps along the way, and Sunny begins to consider a life beyond what she was taught to expect by Lenny.
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