#BlogTour ‘The Choice’ by Penny Hancock

About the book…

Renee Gulliver appears to have it all: a beautiful house overlooking a scenic estuary on England’s East Coast; a successful career as a relationship therapist; three grown up children; and a beloved grandson, Xavier. But things aren’t always as they seem on the surface, as Renee is all too aware. And when Xavier vanishes after she fails to pick him up from school one day, the repercussions are manifold.

Renee is wracked with remorse; her daughter Mia can’t forgive her; the local community question her priorities; and her clients abandon her. But as long-held family secrets threaten to tear her world apart once and for all, those same secrets might also hold hope for the future — because it’s not always the secret itself that has the power to destroy; sometimes it’s the act of keeping of it . . .

For fans of Hannah Beckerman and Lucy Diamond, Penny Hancock’s ‘The Choice’ is a beautiful, haunting novel about family secrets and silences — and the power of love.

My huge thanks to the blog tour organisers for introducing me to Penny’s work. She is a new to me author but I was immediately gripped by the atmospheric way in which she structured the story around the complexity of family relationships.

The use of boats as a thematic device to bookend what is essentially Renee and her daughter Irena’s narrative, was so skillfully done. At once free but also moored to a static landscape,it is understandable that the freedom which the open water affords is contrasted with the needs of Renee’s husband,Tobias, following a stroke,her therapy clients and her 2 grown up children, Mia and George.

Her decision to spend that one afternoon released from her moorings and just being herself, sure that she was not due to collect her grandchild, Xavier from school, is so relatable.

And so too is the guilt that so many women bear that they should choose to put others first. A brief window of time out where societal rules and expectations don’t apply shouldn’t be so laden with worry.

But the consequence of this one small act has a catastrophic fallout.

A change in routine meant that the afternoon Renee thought was free, was when she should have been picking up Xavier. So when the frantic call comes from Mia about where her son is arrives, the bottom of Renee’s world falls out (as does the reader’s because this Penny has done such a fantastic job of establishing Renee and Xavier’s relationship).

Where Xavier is and who has taken him is a storyline which runs parallel to Renee’s recounting of how she and Tobias met, had a family, and the cataclysmic event which has divided them from middle child Irena.

It explores with great heart and depth the expectations of society on the roles ascribed to women, the standards they are meant to hold themselves accountable to, and the choices we make on a daily basis.

It is a novel of family ties, how they can bind you in love or suffocate you in knots. It is a novel of decisions made, and accepting the consequences of them. And, ultimately, it is a novel of forgiveness, hope and trust .

About the author…

Penny grew up in South East London and then did an English degree in Newcastle Upon Tyne. For several years she taught English as a foreign language in Italy, Greece and Morocco. She then took a PGCE, got a job as a Primary school teacher in an inner city London school, and moved into her partner Andy’s short-life house in East London, which is now part of the hardcore under the M11 that links their new home in Cambridge with her birth place in Greenwich!

While bringing up their three children, she continued to teach in primary schools, taught English to asylum seekers, and ran adult education classes in writing. She also wrote articles for various papers (The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Ed, The Sunday Express magazine, and Child Education, amongst others) specialising in family and education. Penny has also written readers for English language learners for Cambridge University Press, and a Primary English course for children published by Longmans. It was an Arvon writing course and an MA in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University that encouraged her to complete her first novel.

Links-http://pennyhancock.com/

Twitter @Pennyhancock @MantleBooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n