Fran Morrison is returning home after a long absence. A falling out with her father led her to a life of traveling, playing the tuba with orchestras around Europe. She turned her back on the family glassmaking business, Minster Glass, along with her father and his assistant, Zac.
Now she’s back in light of her father’s illness and isn’t sure what she should be doing. In her discussions with those who knew her 
father, Fran stumbles upon a mystery involving a stained glass window her family’s business made for the church in the 1800’s. As she becomes more and more immersed in the stained glass window, Fran begins making a home for herself, though she doesn’t know where she really belongs.
This is an interesting novel that I suppose is a romance – but that isn’t the engine that drives this book. As Fran’s father becomes increasingly ill, she is forced to confront the problem at the heart of their relationship – his refusal ever to discuss her mother. And when she continues to research the lost stained glass window in the local church, she finds out a lot more about the past than she bargained for. The book has two protagonists; Fran and Laura Brownlow, whose diary from the past draws Fran to examine aspects of her own life. This can be a tricky call – especially if one plotline is significantly stronger than another.
While Fran’s need to put down roots is the main story arc, I thoroughly enjoyed Laura’s struggle to cope with her grieving parents and the conventions of a gently brought up Victorian girl. Hore is an accomplished writer who deftly manages to convey just what a brittle, twitchy character Fran is – a difficult call when writing in first person viewpoint.
The other impressive aspect of this book is the amount of detail that Hore uses regarding the craft of making stained glass objects. Whether this has been a much-loved hobby, or she grew up in a family business like Fran, she produces just enough detail to intrigue the reader and make us aware of just what a skilled job it is, without silting up the narrative drive, again – a difficult balancing act.
I also enjoyed the fact that while Fran evidently comes from a fairly comfortable middle-class background and her research into a Victorian past initially appears to be quite gentle, Hore makes us very aware that this is a contemporary book with modern issues. While living at home, Fran encounters an old school friend, Jo, whose need to help leads her into a mess that causes personal havoc and we are never allowed to forget we are in the middle of London, with vandalism and crime a constant concern.
Any niggles? Well, I do have one – and it’s the fact that Fran discovers Laura’s story through her diary, but as often happens with such primary source material, the diary entries stop and her storyline is continued in third person point of view. While I fully accept that if Laura had been introduced and then the reader was left without knowing what became of her, it would have been extremely annoying, the historian in me was grumping a bit at this piece of ‘cheating’. The fact is, if we are lucky enough to possess a slice of writing from an ancestor in similar circumstances, they all too frequently stop pouring their thoughts out onto the pages when that particular crisis is past, leaving us perpetually wondering exactly what happened to them. It is the nature of looking back into the past. The neat closure Hore gave Laura was a solid piece of storytelling, but at the expense of the reality that faced Fran.
Overall though, this is an accomplished well-written book that manages to be so much more than an escapist romance read and one I highly recommend if you enjoy contemporary women’s fiction.
8/10
Brainfluff 