Name: Ode to Gina
Brand: Austin Macauley Publishers
SKU: 9781037127991
Price: 8.99 GBP
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Malyn Bromfield

This story is set in post-war Coventry after the Blitz.

The reader is taken into the 1960s at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral with the Queen and Princess Margaret.

Teenager Rosalind has a granny, Alice. The story goes back to the 19th century, when Granny Alice was a child living in Coventry with her parents, her brother, and her twin sister, Gina.

As the title suggests, music is an important theme. Gina loved playing the piano and hoped for a musical career when she grew up.

This story is all about solving the mystery of Granny Alice’s long-lost sister. Whatever could have happened to a ten-year-old child who so very suddenly disappeared, with no explanation from her parents to Alice? It has been a great sadness for Alice to have heard nothing at all of Gina for the rest of her life.

This problem must be solved to make Granny happy, but it is not the only mystery for Rosalind to try to solve. Her mother is a single parent and refuses to tell her anything about her father.

Malyn Bromfield was born and raised in Coventry until moving to Leeds to study. Since her marriage, she has lived in the north of England. Malyn is currently a retired teacher in the Yorkshire Dales, where she volunteers as a museum tour guide at The Folly in Settle. She has always loved Coventry: both for the old medieval parts of the city and its post-war modern architecture. Malyn has published two history novels, Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn and Mr Pepys and the Primrose Hill Mystery, which follows Samuel Pepys as he becomes ensnared in a murder investigation. This is now a 300-year-old unsolved murder mystery.

Customer Reviews

5.0

1 reviews

Susan Leona Fisher

I had previously read the author’s two historical fiction novels so I knew I was in for more excellent writing within a carefully researched context. This story is rather different, in that it takes place principally in the early 1960s and the main setting is the author’s birthplace, Coventry and her love of the place very much comes across. The story spans four generations of a Coventry family, who experienced the losses of war and the dreadful bombardment of the city. It is seen largely through the eyes of Rosalind, the only child of a single mother, who is about to become a teenager, and whose curiosity has been aroused when, after her grandfather’s funeral, her grandmother (Alice) tells her she’s no tears to shed, since she cried them all for Gina years ago. So begins Rosalind’s attempts to find out about Gina and the use of the first person present tense takes the reader alongside her in this quest. There is a painting, an old photograph and the ancient piano that is no longer played. It is not easy to ask her mother or her grandmother directly because there are things that are not spoken of, not only the mystery of Gina, but her own paternity. For the reader, there are also glimpses into the past through the eyes of Alice, recalling her own childhood in the late Victorian era. We also have the reflections of Handel, Alice’s neighbour, which give the reader more clues to explaining Gina’s disappearance, so by the end we are possibly ahead of Rosalind in solving the mystery. Nevertheless, it kept me guessing to the end. There is some evocative descriptive writing and, through Rosalind’s words, the author very much captures what it was like to be an adolescent girl in the early sixties. There’s a nice scene early on, when Rosalind escorts Alice to see the Queen and Princess Margaret processing from the Cathedral after the reconsecration service in 1963, and the author uses the imagery of reconciliation and forgiveness as a parallel with the healing needed in a family that has endured much loss and bereavement, as well as the tensions of long-held secrets and the emotional fallout when they are exposed. A thought-provoking read. Recommended.