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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.
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
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
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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Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
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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.
