Love, Life, Grief
The Sea Glass Beach by Tina Pritchard is a marvelous historical novel that captured my imagination from the start.
The reader follows the plight of a single Mum and her daughter in Ireland after the second World War. The Catholic church set up mother and baby homes which were far from loving. We witness the courage and pluck needed to keep hold of your baby.
This courage would be needed in later life too as we witness a mother who loves her daughter enough, to give her wings to fly.
A close-knit Irish community wants to squash a free spirit. The reader follows a character across the ocean to Canada for a fresh start. Here the bracing sea air and a farming lifestyle open up new horizons.
Many people face battles we know nothing about. A character has been battling grief for years. “You can be too full of grief and burdened with memories to get on with the task of living. I’ve been just existing.” It is time to learn to live again.
There is much love and some free spirits within the novel. We must not clip the wings of another but encourage them to soar.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Sea Glass Beach. The novel was refreshing as the love and life radiated from the pages.
I received a free copy via Rachel’s Random Resources for a blog tour. A favourable review was not required. All opinions are my own.
JULIA WILSON
In 1950’s southern Ireland, single mother Theresa gives birth to a child she names Roisin. Arrangements are in hand for the adoption when Theresa changes her mind. The child, gifted and intuitive, is viewed by the local community as ‘odd’. Reeling from the news of Roisin’s heart-breaking expulsion from convent school, Theresa makes a momentous decision. To protect her daughter, she must send her away.
Canada’s wild beauty serves as a backdrop to a year of challenges for Roisin. She encounters trauma and devastating loss, but also gains a new family and finds love with the enigmatic Cal. Death, grief and culpability are potent forces she must somehow come to terms with. Can a tiny model boat unshackle her from her past and help her journey into a hopeful future?
Purchase Links
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BMJR3ZT3
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMJR3ZT3
Author Bio – Tina Pritchard spent most of her life engaged in bringing up a family, taking a social science degree, working as a lecturer, a trainer and more recently as an independent celebrant conducting funerals, weddings and naming ceremonies. Her first book, a psychological thriller, In A Deep Dark Wood, was published in 2021. The Sea Glass Beach is a departure in genre and started life as a short story morphing over the years into a novel. It is a work of fiction inspired in part by her own mother’s experience of giving birth to a child at Sean Ross Abbey Mother and Baby Home in the 1950’s. That child, born all those years ago in Co Tipperary, Ireland, is the author of this book.
Tina loves to write and has won competitions for both her short stories and her poetry. She lives in a beautiful part of the world and gains much of her inspiration from walking her badly behaved terrier, Horace, in the Derbyshire countryside.
Thank you for your wonderful review of my book The Sea Glass Beach. I really appreciate it and I’m so glad you enjoyed Roisins’s journey.