Synopsis
Flightsend is Charlie's new home, whether she likes it or not. Her mother sees it as an end to all that’s gone so tragically wrong. They had been a proper family. Mum; her boyfriend, Sean; and Charlie, with a new baby sister on the way. But the baby died before she was born and everything changed. Gradually, Charlie’s mother pushed Sean away, before resigning from her job and selling the house.
Charlie is certain that the move to a ramshackle cottage, miles from anywhere, can only make things worse. She couldn’t be more wrong. For Charlie’s mum there’s a new business and the fresh start that she knew she needed. And for Charlie there’s a new job, new friends, a newly discovered talent for art, and new feelings for two very different men. It’s a summer of beginnings, not ends; a summer that Charlie will never forget.
Publishers Weekly
Set in an English village, this novel has the feel of an earlier time (it was first published in the U.K. in 1999). Charlie has just moved with her mother, Kathy, to a neglected 150-year-old country cottage, Flightsend, where they hope for a new start after Kathy’s miscarriage. Descriptive passages of riotous plant life permeate many scenes (“and now here were the aconites, floating like golden lilies on the dark soil”). Kathy’s newfound optimism, apparently partly fueled by medication, is juxtaposed with Charlie’s anxieties about her social life, though, for 16, she is remarkably supportive and nurturing, so little tension is created. Instead, Newbery’s (At the Firefly Gate) story wanders through a series of benign events, such as the arrival of a handsome German pilot who gives meaning to the name of the cottage and eventually becomes Kathy’s beau. Charlie finds herself drawn to and attracting attention from her lecherous art teacher, and she longs for another man as well—her mother’s ex-boyfriend. Yet these potentially dangerous entanglements are, like the vegetation, eventually tamed. The result is a pleasing, quiet coming-of-age story. Ages 12–up. (Jan.)