"The Cuckoo Sister" by Alison Stockham

An audio book.

Maggie, ex-costume designer and a reluctant mother of Eliot (1) and Emily (2) spills boiling water over them by accident. She takes them to the hospital in Cambridge. Her sister Rose arrives, so does Steven, her husband who she's not getting on well with. She walks out, catching a coach to Scotland where she's stopped from killing herself at a beach by Ailsa who she knew online. Rose and Steven take the kids home, Rose looking after them. Maggie is out of contact but the police know that she bought a ticket to Glasgow. Laura visits the family's house weekly - she's a friend of Maggie who had discouraged her from her shotgun marriage.

Rose quits her job to look after the children. She realises that she hasn't been a supportive sister. She also thinks that whatever Maggie's mental state, it wasn't thoughtful of her to just disappear. She finds Steven physically attractive but not appealing. He accepts that he hadn't helped enough with parenting. They discover lots of pills at Maggie's bedside.

On Emily's birthday the phone rings. Rose takes it. There no voice but Rose assumes it's Maggie. She says that Maggie must be ill and that there's no rush to come back.

Maggie writes letters to her children weekly that Ailsa says she's sending. Rose starts sleeping with Steven. They don't tell the children about their biological mother. Some neighbours aren't impressed. When Emily starts pre-school, it's as if Rose is her mother.

Laura tracks Maggie down. Maggie returns. She's upset that the children don't know that she's their real mother. Rose and Steven say they did it for the sake of the children. There's an agreement that Maggie pretends to be their aunt from now on. She does this partly to wait for an opportunity to take over her old role. Sometimes this cover-story is put under pressure by a random meeting in the street, or by a mistake by Maggie/Rose's parents.

Steven walks in front of a car and dies. The news is given to Maggie, Rose and the children together. While looking for the will, Maggie finds her letters. Steven must have hidden them. They go to Scotland. Ailsa suggests that they visit the beach. Maggie thinks that a stay will help the whole family.

Surely she would have somehow arranged to get feedback from the letters. Surely she'd have kept in frequent touch with Ailsa. There's little observation (of the children especially) and lots of repetition as the characters think over issues without adding new arguments. I think there are some infelicities in the writing -

• "Emily rose her head"
• "fear rose the hairs on the back of her neck"
• I have trouble working out statements like "[the children] were more resilient than anyone had feared" - maybe it's correct, but shouldn't "feared" be "hoped"?

I wasn't convinced.

Other reviews

• A. J. Sefton (It is quite a slow book with the ideas and arguments being repeated often with no conclusions in a circular fashion. Not much happens either. However, the most disappointing feature is that there is no medical, social services or legal intervention. A new mother disappears without trace, her phone found in the street, and the police only manage to find a couple of cctv images and give in? No news coverage, even locally? A bit unrealistic in Britain I think. An easy book to read, if a little long winded)
• elspells (I sometimes found myself sympathising with a character, nodding along, only for them to go a step to far and for me to recoil at having empathised with them. It’s a morally grey, tangled situation, and I loved puzzling it all out and thinking about the wider implications.)