We found the characters in this book interesting and well drawn. It was easy to read, although perhaps a little slow to start. Most of us read the book to the end.
Fergus Bloggs has had a severe stroke and, going through his belongings, his daughter Sabrina finds boxes of marbles. This coincides with a rare day off from work for her and she sets about finding out more about her father and the marbles both of which were a mystery to her.
Fergus was a secretive man. He was ashamed of his family, even of his wife later in life so he invents a different life for himself, using the name of his idolised dead brother. He was a champion at marbles, but his family knew nothing of this side of his life. Sabrina’s character developed during the book as she was struggling to find out what had happened in her father’s life and what had happened to the two valuable marbles she had discovered were missing from his collection that she had found. It seems for a long time that these missing marbles had been sold – and indeed it seems that Fergus believed this to be the case as he had given them to his last love - Cat - to sell to make the money that he was desperately in need of but it transpires that Cat had not sold them and had given him the money herself. She knew how much the marbles meant to Fergus so kept them for him.
There were several passages that we felt were well written and that we enjoyed. We found the passage at the start of the book, where Fergus’ mother loses her longed for baby girl at birth, very sad and well written and we liked the fact that she got on with life after this tragedy. Fergus’ stroke and subsequent loss of memory was also sad but we found his brothers coming to the care home to see him in the end very pleasing and again well written.
Sabrina’s husband was interesting as he seemed t be making up for his extra marital affair by being kind and supportive during Sabrina’s search for her family history. Sabrina was able to let go of this and finally answer some questions about herself too. We felt that Sabrina would have been keen to search her family history, as she did have a rather boring job, although we did like the elderly man who kept trying to drown himself.
We found the story character driven and interesting, delving in to the subject of family secrets and lies. We learned about the games and making of marbles and felt that the loose ends were well tied up at the end if the book. Some of our readers were interested enough in the subject to Google’ Marbles as a game for adults,’ which we had not come across before, it being a game for children as far as we were concerned. One striking and perhaps slightly odd note was that although the cover makes much of the fact that the story takes place in one day we none of us felt that this came across at all in the reading.
Our score for this book was 6.5 out of 10