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How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie Amber's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.
Genre: Family/relationship drama, with themes of extramarial affairs, pregnancy, death, eating disorder.
Chergui's Child is the story of Olivia, whose aunt has just died; to her surprise, she is left a large amount of money in the will. Olivia is a troubled woman; her relationship with her mother is difficult, to put it mildly, and she has an eating disorder. Early in the book, she receives a letter that reveals a startling revelation; this sends her on a life-changing journey.
The novel alternates between her present dilemmas, which include her mother contesting the money left by the aunt, and the past, when she was a medical student having an affair with her tutor, Richie, whose wife had her own problems. I'm a fan of this structure, and in this case the slow building up of the past-that-led-to-the-present made it much more interesting than just a straight story.
Olivia travels to France and to Gibraltar as more revelations provide missing pieces in her life's jigsaw. Generally, the family dynamics of all characters involved are well drawn. I did think that, generally, there was too much domestic/conversational minutiae that was not needed for the plot, and slowed it down. Some of the characters came alive to me (Martin, Richie, Dorothy and Roz), some didn't; alas, for me, Olivia fell in the latter group. The only emotion I felt towards her was slight irritation at her naïveté; she didn't understand that age-old cliché and truth of the mistress of a married man: that once you become problematic or needy you no longer supply the romantic fantasy, and are, thus, dispensible. Mostly, I felt no connection with her.
I was a little unsure about the feasibility of some elements: Olivia is told about her inheritance by her own solicitor two days later after her aunt dies, and the funeral is the next day. In my experience, it takes a couple of days even for the death certificate to come through, funerals take far longer than that to arrange, and I would have thought that Olivia's solicitor would have had to wait for instruction from executors, etc. Also, in the flashback chapters, a tragic death takes place in Morocco that is central to the plot, but, again, I was unconvinced by some practicalities, and also the subsequent reactions of the character involved.
I liked many parts of this novel, but on the whole, for me, it lacked a spark that would have made it memorable. But the writing flows well, and I am sure readers who like easy-read, emotional family dramas would enjoy it.
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