The Bloom Girls by Emily Cavanagh: book review

The Bloom Girls (2017) is set during a Boston winter, and in a father’s house in Maine.

Almost twenty years earlier the Bloom family split apart when Joseph Bloom was accused of sexual misconduct at the co-ed preparatory school where he was a teacher. His three daughters – Callie, Violet, and Suzy – were teenagers.

Now in their 30s, Cal is married to Howard with two young children; Violet is living on Annie’s couch since separating from Luka two months before; and Suzy has just found out she is pregnant to her ex-partner Ian.

Their father Joseph, now a chef at the Veg restaurant in Maine, has just died. His business partner Barry has told the Bloom girls. They immediately drive to Maine to arrange the funeral.

Each of the Bloom girls is dealing with their own domestic crisis, but now they are faced, again, with the allegations against their father and everything that forced their family them apart. What they had not dealt with when they were teenagers, what they had known and not known – all their father’s secrets – must now be confronted. As they come together in Maine, more secrets emerge.

There are few characters in this family and generational novel, but they are reasonably well developed, and the style is easy-to-read. However, the psychology of the past could have been dealt with in more depth to explore loss, family secrets, relationships, and reputations.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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