A review by claire_fuller_writer
The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

2.0

I'm not sure what this book is about. At first it seemed to be a memoir about an abusive mother and what happens after she breaks her hip in old age, and how the elder daughter feels she has to save her father. This could have been interesting except we only ever hear about a couple of terrible things the mother did (which were terrible) in snatches of memory. And we never get to 'meet' the mother; we only hear second hand what she has supposedly said and done. All the way through I felt that the daughter was putting up a side she wanted us to see. Of course, that's the case in all memoirs but with this one it was too obvious. After the mother is 'dealt' with, the story moves on to the father's old age, trouble with her sister, trying to help from a long distance...I'm not sure where the book was going, why it ended when it did, or as I said, what it was about. I'm afraid there are lots of my irritated scrawls all through the text. Let's just say that this wasn't a book for me.