The Happy Ever After

I've known Betty Maura-Cooper for a long time, and I knew that she had written romance novels in the past. More recently, though, she's written a slightly different book, which was obviously a labour of love, and she's asked me to review it for her.

In 1937, Eve Garnett wrote a children's book called The Family at One End Street. It was one of the first British children's books to feature a working class family - the father was a dustman, and the mother (of seven children!) took in washing as the Ideal Laundry. It won the Carnegie Medal (in only the second year of the award's existence), beating other books including The Hobbit. For the 70th anniversary of the Medal, it was named as one of the top ten winners, and has always been in print. Eve Garnett also illustrated the books.
There were two sequels - Further Adventures of the Family at One End Street and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn.

Betty wanted to know what happened to the children of the Ruggles family when they grew up, and decided she wanted to write their story. She contacted the copyright holders, and they said they would only agree to a sequel being published if they read it first - which meant that she had to write the story without knowing whether it would be acceptable.
Fortunately, they liked it, and The Happy Ever After: the family from One End Street grows up is now available, published by Endeavour Media.

I have surprisingly vivid memories of reading the Eve Garnett stories as a child - I loved them - so I was very happy to be asked to review this book. I loved the way Betty brought the family through the decades into the present.

The story is told from the perspective of Lily Rose, the oldest of the seven Ruggles children, now in her eighties and reminiscing about her life just before a big family reunion at the Dew Drop Inn. All the children get their own strand of the story, each of them getting different careers according to their personalities and what sort of opportunities were available to them. At first, the story extrapolates directly from the original books, but as the years pass, what happens to the family comes more from Betty's imagination.
It all works very well - the future she maps out for the family is both plausible, and gives a varied social history of the years after the second world war, with the world changing into something very different from the 1930s.
It's a large cast of characters - the seven siblings and all the people they have relationships with, and their own children, but I never felt confused about who was who. It's a long period to cover, too. The story has a framing narrative set in the present, with the history of the family unfolding gradually, and it was always clear to me which decade the scenes were set in, as the world changes around the family.
By the time Lily Rose's life changed dramatically in middle age, when her own children were grown up and had left home, I was completely emotionally involved with her decisions, and I sat up late to make sure that the family (and Lily Rose) did have their Happy Ever After in the end.