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The Ophelia Girls

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It’s summer in the English countryside in 1993 and the heat won’t break in Jane Healey’s latest novel, The Ophelia Girls. Ruth has returned to her late father’s house to reconnect with her husband Alex and to watch over her three children. The eldest, seventeen-year-old daughter Maeve, has recently recovered from a serious illness, and the tension in the family is broken only by Stuart, a friend of Ruth’s from childhood.

As Maeve attempts to reclaim the days she lost to sickness through an attraction to an inappropriate suitor, Ruth is forced to confront who she really is. Told in alternating timelines, Ruth’s days as a teenager in 1973 stand in contrast to the world of her daughter twenty years later. Mother and daughter, unknowingly, making similar choices for wildly different reasons. Maeve wants desperately to be grown and to move beyond the perception of her as a broken child, while Ruth longs to return to a time when what she wanted, and who, was far simpler.

Healey uses the art of photography as a means to view mother and daughter. As they are captured by different lenses, their lives become perfect representations of the secrets that threaten to destroy us until we live fully, and honestly, our own lives.


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Author Jane Healey
Star Count 5/5
Format Hard
Page Count 368 pages
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publish Date 10-Aug-2021
ISBN 9780358106418
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue December 2021
Category Popular Fiction
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