Searching for Vivian
‘She believed that marriage was a deadly trap for women requiring abandoned careers, unused skills, wasted intelligence, a lifetime of economic dependence and the thankless, narrow world of child-raising and housework.’
At once a coming-of-age novel and a murder mystery, Babette Hughes’ novel, Searching for Vivian, plunges the reader headlong into Emma Russell’s quest to discover her beloved sister’s whereabouts, after twenty years of silent stoicism and repressed feminism in the wake of her parents’ death and her sister’s mysterious disappearance. When Emma’s benefactor, Aunt Eleanor, suffers a heart attack and dies, uncontrollable grief and anger launch a deep desire for truth, and in the process, Emma Russell’s overdue womanhood is born.
Emma’s awakened passions land her in cahoots and in bed with Eric Stevens, a reporter turned writer suffering from writer’s block, who pushes Emma to stand up to her Uncle Thad’s brutish diatribes on the evils of her parents’ hippie lifestyle, in order to glean just one piece of real information to begin sleuthing. And so the breakup with her old self begins, and a bold, powerful, driven Emma is born to reclaim sisterhood, family, and self.
Babette Hughes’ fourth novel draws on the subversiveness of the Sixties, highlighting an era of hippies, draft dodging, the Black Panthers, protests, and racial and gender inequalities to ultimately point the way to empowerment in her rich cast of characters and quick paced plot twists. A novel that begs to be read to the very last page. This reader could not put it down!
e-book reviewed
