The Colours of Love
The story begins in 1923. A ship has been driven onto rocks and the survivors taken to an inn. Two women are about to give birth. One baby, a girl, survives but the other, a boy, is stillborn. The girl is born to a woman who is unmarried and forced to hand the child over to a convent for adoption. Instead she gives her to the other woman, who brings the baby up as her own. What follows is a powerful story of love and the consequences of that loving act.
I am usually not a fan of 20th-century historical novels as, in my opinion, most of them could have been set in any age and have little to do with history, but this one bucks the trend as it could not have been set in any other period. It is typical of the attitudes of the time, and the characters have been portrayed extremely well. The reader is caught up in their lives and the events that followed. I really wanted to know what happened next and how it was all resolved in the end, but for that you will have to read it for yourself. Rita Bradshaw has written a number of novels, and I shall certainly look out for more of them.
