A review by andintothetrees
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

5.0

After You’d Gone was so good that it left me reeling, and even asking the librarian as I returned it “have you read this? You must read it. It’s the best book I’ve read all year”. I thought it was something special, and when I first started reading The Hand That… I even left comments on my post about After You’d Gone saying that nothing could top it. I take it all back – this was even better! So good in fact that in re-reading this post before publication I know I sound like a gibbering wreck, unable to properly convey how much, and why, I loved it. Admittedly, I am partly of that opinion because so much of this book was about motherhood, and specifically the first year or so of it, which obviously is something pertinent to my life at the moment. But it wouldn’t just be any book on that topic that could grab me the way this one did – it was in Maggie O’Farrell’s handling of the subject, the characters she chose to carry it and of course her clever way with words. Above all, I felt she captured perfectly that ambivalence between the pure joy of motherly love, the never-ending (though often low-level) anxiety that comes along with it, and the power of parenthood to alter you utterly, so that you have to rebuild your sense of self again, from the ground up.

... [Read the rest of my review here: https://whathannahread.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/the-hand-that-first-held-mine-by-maggie-ofarrell/]