Seize Your Copy The Unknown Bridesmaid Written By Margaret Forster Distributed In Booklet

bit of an oddity this, Often you start out not liking the main character much, but as the story moves on you become more involved with them, In this I found I quite liked the character to start amp grew to dislike her more as the book went on, Persevered to the end but was left with a feeling that I might have spent my reading time better, This is ultimately quite a sad and dark book, But I liked the moral nothing is as bad as it seems to you when you don't share your worries! When Julia was eight, she was asked to be a bridesmaid at her beautiful cousin Iriss wedding.
Her mother saw this as a chore expensive, inconvenient but Julia was thrilled, When the time came, even the fact that her bridesmaids dress didnt fit, and was plain cream rather than the pink shed hoped for, couldnt ruin the day.
But after this, things began to go wrong for Julia, starting with an episode involving her cousins baby, a pram and a secret trip round the block.


A lifetime later, Julia is a child psychologist who every day deals with young girls said to be behaving badly, Some are stealing, some are running away from home, some are terribly untidy, some wont eat or get out of bed, Julia has a special knack with these girls, She understands which really are troubled, and which are at the mercy of the way they are seen by the adults around them,

But one day, Julias own troubled past starts to creep into her present, And as she struggles to understand her childhood self, she must confront the possibility that the truth may not be as devastating as she feared, In the past I have loved some of Margaret Forster's novels, but I found her style dated and as other reviewers have said, at times clunky and clumsy.
The story line is not believable and really quite grim, I'm sad because I had hoped for more, A very clever book and not just clever the emotions are fully engaged via the intellect, Offers so much food for thought yet so smoothly written that it's a real page turner and hard to put down, In some ways it is the earlier generations that are the protagonists, the grandparents that are dead before the book starts and about which we hardly hear, and the two sisters whose internal life is never explored directly, but who each have a daughter.
A lot of other reviewers have drawn morals from the tale but I don't think the author is moralising, just that there is room for each reader to make their own.
For me it's just keep talking, love your family and friends and hope for some good luck at times, I managed to devour allpages of Margaret Forster's The Unknown Bridesmaid at one go, . . so riveting was her story and told as always in a crisp, straightforward style, that stays refreshing, precious and memorable to the senses,

Also, the beautiful part to a classic Forster novel is in taking comfort that not all family relationships are perfect, that they are more likely to be sadly mutilated, damaged and definitely frayed at some point, at the edges.
The solution would lie in survival the art of plodding through everyday motions with cautious ferocity and grim fortitude, In fact, the novelist goes to great pains to exhibit that noisy or colourful clamour in a home may be regarded as anything but cosy, There may just be one skeleton too many locked in a closet, to be revealed a little at a time and that superficial pretensions to social relationships and the fragile threads that hold unlikely people together whether they be tiresome family aunts or misunderstood friends may actually prove to be more of a necessary evil, when measured in the bigger scheme of things.


In The Unknown Bridesmaid, Forster sketches a profound childhood story of a successfulyear old child psychologist, Julia whose job it is to counsel troubled children with expert ease.
The children that are summoned at different times to Julia's side all open painful, little windows that gently reveal the lack of real understanding that adults

especially those caught in difficult aspects of a crisis often appear to have over their own children, already laden with complicated temperaments.
Mothers often appear to be brittle in tone, are easily reproachful and many atime, a confused lot,

But Julia's story is itself not perfect, Without giving anything away and through various episodes, Julia harbours a strange guilt and fear that may be held similar to those of the children she so kindly talks to.
As a reader, I found Julia's childhood character hardly endearing, This, deliberately made so by Forster, But Julia wrestles well with her demons and becomes extremely likeable in adulthood as Forster takes us on Julia's clandestine journey of loneliness and detachment, As the story progresses, there is a clear touch of inspiration, Like building blocks, the exposition scenes where the past interjects with the present, all fit neatly, . . one into the other.

I particularly liked the major scenes that depicted the volatile relationship between Julia's middleaged mother and the girl's aunt, The earlier hostility and grumblings that are tossed back and forth between the two grudging sisters, would later translate through unexpected family troubles, into a rough kindness, a series of comforting dialogues and the confirmation of a faithful kinship.
The Unknown Bridesmaid is a perfect novel for any reader who appreciates complete honesty in family relationships, This novel follows the life of Julia: first a weird, kind of meanspirited child, then an even more meanspirited teenager who is a bully, later a bitter and sour woman.
I did not like her, and the novel didn't do enough to explain her behavior for me, While she was bearable as a child and as a teen I could find some justifications for her on my own, during her adult years I was mostly shaking my head and being annoyed.

Also, for a long time I felt like this novel wasn't going anywhere, which in the end was kind of true, All problems, plot points etc turned out to have no real consequences in the end, which felt really anticlimactic,
What I liked at first was the structure of the book, going back and forth between scenes from Julia's early years and her adult life, with little scenes from her work as a child psychologist.
For a while I was really interested in the cases of girls she consulted on, but since we never got more than a page or two and the kid was never mentioned again, I lost interest in that aspect too.
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