The Stargazers
A disordered childhood and abusive parents can cast a long shadow over adult life. The Stargazers is the story of Sarah, who has a bizarrely unhappy childhood with an obsessive and deranged mother, from which she escapes only to find the transition to marriage and parenthood extremely difficult.
The story is told principally in two time-streams. The first part of the book is set in north London in the early 1970s and sees Sarah setting up home in a new neighbourhood and starting a family. The second part goes back to the early 1950s and her weirdly dysfunctional home life and dreadful boarding school. Then we are back in the early 1970s for part three and from there we follow her life episodically to 2020. There are also flashbacks to the 1920s to explore Sarah’s mother’s childhood.
The plot is quite improbable but the story is psychologically convincing. This is how a child would have reacted to such a childhood – although not the only way because her older sister reacted differently – and this is how it would have scarred her later life. It is a fairy tale which embodies deeper truths, and like most fairy tales has a happy ending.
