“Dreadful events are a part of life and you can sink under the weight of the burden, or you can carry on with your life and try to be a better person because of it.”

I’ll admit that I was tempted to read this novel when I read the reference to Nova Scotia on the cover. As I am a lifelong resident of Nova Scotia, my interest was immediately piqued.

This charming, gentle novel had me gripped from start to finish. Peopled with strong female characters, the story followed the fate of Roisin O’Conner, a young Irish girl who comes to Canada from Ireland and lives on a small farm with her aunt and uncle. The seasons figure prominently, as does Roisin’s developing maturity. Brought up in Ireland by a single mother in the 1950s, Roisin was a strong, intelligent, and at times peculiar girl with a strong moral compass. She loved running barefoot outdoors almost as much as she loved to read.

The writing flowed smoothly, the descriptions were vividly rendered, and the dialog natural. Though it was a story without ‘excitement’ it did cause this reader to avidly turn the pages nonetheless.

This is a story of friendship, family, hopes, dreams, loss, and love. It speaks to the heavy-handedness of the Catholic Church back in the fifties which stigmatized unwed mothers. Also it affirms the importance of having self respect and being self-reliant. Highly recommended!

This review was written voluntarily and my rating was in no way influenced by the fact that I received a complimentary digital copy of this novel from Rachel’s Random Resources in order that I could participate in this blog tour.

This book was independently published.

ISBN: 9798363728754 – ASIN: ‎ ‎ B0BMJR3ZT3 – 305 pages

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.

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