The House of Broken Bricks: A Novel

What a creative and interesting story this author has woven. An intelligent and promising young Black woman has given up her career and her family to marry a provincial gardener in England. Her new life is gray, rainy, rural, and tedious. They have twins together, which creates a further problem as one twin is dark and the other is quite light. The mother is taken for the White twin’s nanny when she takes him to town. She has no friends and the isolation of the place and the ensuing tragedy brings her to despair.

The author is adept at painting a marriage where the partners are miles apart even as the dwell together. The sons are oppressed by the tension and their parents inability to be civil to each other. That the story has such promise brings this reader to feel that the ending is anti-climactic and takes too very long to wrap up. That being said, the author is well worth reading for her skill at creative storytelling.