Light a Penny Candle - Maeve Binchy

[goodreads]

Title: Light a Penny Candle
Author: Maeve Binchy
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 2/5
# pages: 636
Date read: June, 2013

Evacuated from Blitz-battered London, shy and genteel Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the boisterous O'Connors in Kilgarret, Ireland. It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship that will endure through twenty turbulent years of change and chaos, joy and sorrow, soaring dreams and searing betrayals.

Maeve Binchy's debut novel, and unfortunately it really shows. She hasn't found her own voice at all, and I kept thinking I was reading a Rosamunde Pilcher novel instead. Not that there's anything wrong with RP, I just missed the charm of Maeve Binchy's later books.

The thing I love about Maeve Binchy's books is that they're generally speaking comfort reads. There are exceptions of course, but as a rule people tend to be in a better place at the end of the book than they were at the beginning. That is not the case with this book, and that - more than anything else - made me give it just 2 stars. It's the account of ~20 years of Elizabeth and Aisling's lives, and offers no resolution or has no real end... in fact, I was pretty shocked to see it end where it did. There seemed no rhyme or reason for it. It was as if Maeve Binchy suddenly realized how many pages she'd written already, and couldn't find a proper way to end it, so she just did.

It had its moments, but as a whole, I wasn't terribly impressed by it.