Waiting For The Miracle – Anna McPartlin

2010

Caroline has hit rock bottom. After years of trying, it’s clear she can’t have children, and the pain has driven her and her husband apart. She isn’t pregnant, her husband is gone and her beloved dog is dead.

The other women at her infertility support group have their own problems, too. Natalie’s girlfriend is much less excited about having children than her. Janet’s husband might be having an affair. And then there’s Ronnie, intriguing, mysterious Ronnie, who won’t tell anyone her story.

1976

Catherine is sixteen and pregnant. Her boyfriend wants nothing to do with her, and her parents are ashamed. When she’s sent away to a convent for pregnant girls, she is desperate not to be separated from her child. But she knows she might risk losing the baby forever.

My Review:

I’ve read most of Anna’s books and I always need to get myself emotionally psyched up before starting one of her books, because they always, always, make me cry.

Anna’s past books have been highly emotive and heartbreaking stories and Waiting For The Miracle is no exception.

This is the story of a group of women wanting to become mothers, actually it’s more than wanting, it’s needing to have a child and their journeys through IVF, miscarriages, infertility, relationships, marriage and hope.

Told over two timelines, both set in Ireland, Caroline, Janet, Natalie and Ronnie meet at an infertility support group in 2010. The reader follows these wonderful women through heartache and heartbreak as they try to fulfill their dreams of becoming parents.

The other timeline is the story of Catherine, a teenager in 1976, the daughter of a pig farmer in a rural village who falls pregnant bringing shame onto her family. Shunned by her boyfriend, she is sent to a Mother and Baby Home run by sadistic nuns. The abuse Catherine endures at the hands of the “sisters” is abhorrent, however we now know that these homes are based on FACT and the author has written about this barbaric time in Ireland without sugar coating anything.

As with all Anna’s books, there is a wonderful dry humour and clever wit, despite the heartbreak and emotions, and when the two timelines begin to merge together I defy any reader not to shed a tear or two.