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A Novel
by Emily Critchley
Book Reviewed by:A mystery she can't remember. A friend she can't forget.
I kept your secret Lucy. I've kept it for more than sixty years...
It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living with her eccentric mother and her mother's new boyfriend, she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life.
So when the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. Even though Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep.
Then Lucy goes missing.
Now in 2018, Edie is eighty-four and still living in the same small town, when one afternoon she glimpses Lucy Theddle, still looking the same as she did at fifteen. Her family write it off as one of her many mix ups, there's a lot Edie gets confused about these days. But Edie knows she's the key to finding Lucy.
Time is running out and Edie must piece together the clues before Lucy is forgotten forever.
"Memory is the diary we all carry about with us."
PROLOGUE
I stand on the empty platform under the heat of the midmorning sun. The station is on the edge of a small town, and the surrounding fields are full of golden wheat waiting to be harvested. The huge sky stretches wide and cloudless, a clear, hard blue above the patchwork of green and yellow fields. From the station bridge, a few cows can be seen grazing, flicking away flies with their tails. A hand-printed sign advertises PICK YOUR OWN STRAWBERRIES. High above me, a starling spins his chatty song.
Very soon these familiar fields and lanes will be combed by police and volunteers. Bodies beating back the wheat, peering under the hedgerows, crawling across the land with their maps and torches, hoping to be the ones who can shed light on the local girl's disappearance, yet dreading what they may discover. Hundreds of statements will be taken, residents' questionnaires studied and analyzed, and of ...
One Puzzling Afternoon is a page-turning, enjoyable, easy read. The quaint portrait of a small village not far from London with its shops and bakeries and the British Red Cross is the sweet part of the story. That Lucy disappears in such a place magnifies the mystery. Where did she go? Critchley leaves nothing undone and nothing to guess at later. Her pacing is exceptional as she unpeels Edie's story, which is also the story of Nancy. All the pieces fit neatly. Lucy's wealth and status. Edie's insecurity and strange mother. Lucy's stepfather, a bully of a man, the only man Lucy truly loathes. And the secret that keeps two girls bound to one another...continued
Full Review
(686 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Eva Jurczyk, international bestselling author of The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
One Puzzling Afternoon introduces Edie Green, a sympathetic protagonist, at the dawn and dusk of her womanhood, and gives the reader the satisfying task of slipping back and forth in time to untangle the events of younger Edie's life that have begun to slip from older Edie's memory. Freya Sampson, author of The Last Chance Library
An uplifting, bittersweet story with a page-turning mystery at its heart. Emily Critchley writes about aging and memory with huge warmth and compassion. A beautifully atmospheric and endearing book. Lucy Gilmore, author of The Lonely Hearts Book Club
One Puzzling Afternoon is a quiet, compelling mystery of a woman untangling the secrets locked inside herself. This truly unique story blends past and present in a way that feels real. Great atmosphere and even better characters. Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
A captivating and poignant book, I was completely hooked. You can't help but fall for Edie as she desperately tries to find the lost friend from her past, while she begins to lose herself to dementia in the present.After a dementia diagnosis, the rules that families depend on — who takes care of who — just don't exist anymore. The hierarchy of parent and child or grandparent and grandchild dissolves under lost memory. Dementia is an illness that affects two people: The patient, and the person caring for them. Anger or frustration often ensues because of what has disappeared. This occurs throughout Emily Critchley's novel One Puzzling Afternoon, but a particular example is when Edie, a widow, mother, and grandmother in the throes of early-stage dementia, becomes irritated while in a café. Her son and granddaughter are unaware she has slipped into a period of the past when she was a sixteen-year-old girl. She is fussy and rude and ...
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