Review: Who Do You Think You Are Maggie Pink?

Who Do You Think You Are Maggie Pink? by Janet Hoggarth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Maggie Pink has always known she was adopted, her adoptive parents have been very open with her on that point, they were kind and good parents but she didn't really have much in common with them and they weren't overly affectionate. Nevertheless, Maggie never felt comfortable trying to contact her birth mother while her adoptive parents were alive.

In addition to being a virtual orphan, Maggie is also battling with a bolshie teenage daughter called Roxie and the disintegration of her marriage to Adam, the menopause, and the events of a few years past (yet to be revealed).

While Adam (a music journalist) is working abroad, Maggie and Roxie (albeit reluctantly) travel to the Highlands of Scotland to re-engage with her birth mother Morag, and find out why she was abandoned as a baby.

What Maggie and Roxie discover is more than just the truth of Maggie's birth and adoption, its a family history of shared experiences through the generations from Morag's mother, Morag, Maggie, and Roxie. Can they learn from the past to prevent a repeat in the future?

I liked this, but I didn't love this. First, it kind of reminded me of one of those generational books that used to be popular back in the 1980s (like Barbara Taylor Bradford's Emma Harte saga), with each generation making mistakes and paying the price, which sat uneasily with the modern. Second, there seemed to be an awful lot of traumas suffered by a small group of people - which I won't list because *spoilers*. Overall, I started to feel that this family tree was a genetic dead-end! Also the sheer volume of issues was so overwhelming it started to be funny. Secondly, there were so many different points of view, we hear Maggie, Roxie, Morag and even Morag's mother's internal monologues at different times which felt very fractured. Finally, the whole novel hinged on every generation keeping secrets: from siblings; spouses; and children, which just led to dissent, estrangement and missed opportunities.

From my brief skim of the start of the author's acknowledgements I gather that her mother was adopted and she has drawn upon that experience when writing this novel, so it is clearly an issue close to her heart. I just feel she maybe brought in too many variables and we didn't connect enough with a single character.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.



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