The Telling
The Telling is Rose Mary Boehm's second instalment of the life of Anne Beck, now known as Aybee. A clever, modern-day tale about life's choices and consequences. Her stubborn determination for independence keeps her apart from the love, wisdom, and support of family and friends and turns her plans for her own bright future inside out. Aybee is forced to navigate new beginnings first in Belgium, then England and finally Spain. Each new start is haunted by secrets from her past that come to find her no matter how hard she struggles to escape her ghosts. Will Aybee ultimately find peace in her confessions to a stranger? The finale to this story is surprising - you'll never see coming. A great read that you won't be able to put down.
The telling is the second installment of Rose Mary Boehm first novel "Coming Up for Air". In THE TELLING we find out how the life of the main character unfolds after her WWII childhood. This new novel is a life in retrospect with twists and turns the reader NEVER sees coming. It is one of those novels that you simply cannot put down and the story continues to haunt your brain. It is a study of how life can never be planned and definitely a MUST read!
Vic Heaney "VH"
In fact the book is told through two viewpoints, that of the young journalist, who writes in the third person as "Aybee" tells her story, bit by bit: and, in alternate chapters, a narrator's-eye view of events as they unfolded, each chapter being in a subsequent time-frame to the last: it works.
This is a fascinating tale of the life of a young woman cut off from her roots, far from her origins but making her home in one part of the world after another, facing life's blows with fortitude, determined to be herself and to live with the consequences of decisions made - despite frequent doubts as to the wisdom of those decisions.
Some of the things which happen to her are quite shocking. Yet she becomes the wise and forthright older woman whose present day personage we become familiar with at the same time as we get to know her younger self.
The ending is sad but happy, especially if you understand or go along with Aybee's beliefs.
Rose Boehm writes with intelligence and flair. Her command of the language is astonishing for somebody who does not have English as her native tongue. I can not imagine getting to grips with any language well enough to be able to write well in it.
I loved this book. I seem to remember when I started to read Rose Mary's first book that this was supposed to be a trilogy. If so I am now waiting eagerly for the third book, although I can see nowhere for the story to go after the denouement of this one.
The Story Behind This Book
When I wrote COMING UP FOR AIR the novel ends when the protagonist is only about 20. All my readers wanted to know what happened to Annemarie Becker. So I just had to write the next installment. She is now Anne Beck or Aybee. She's become a famous artist and has to deal with the consequences of a lot of bad choices she made in the course of her younger years (the most important of those bad choices she made in COMING UP FOR AIR). But THE TELLING can be read perfectly well as a stand-alone novel.