Little Mercies by Heather Gudenkauf

I actually enjoyed a book for the first time in a long time after a few stinkers recently. Little Mercies was an enthralling novel exploring different aspects of child abuse.

For once I was interested in the characters and the plot. They seemed real people and an original storyline, not the wooden stereotypes conforming to a pre-determined script like so many books appear to me.

Heather Gudenkauf really loves children from the book you can just tell. She thinks all children are special and treasured, her love of them just drips from the pages. In fact Little Mercies was written with so much compassion, not just for the children but even the adults in the book. Even the minor characters well good.

The actual story was written from two perspectives, one of a child who has been abused in the past and becomes separated from her father. The second voice is of a social worker who was so absorbed in her job saving children that she endangered the life of her own child by accident. The two stories eventually merge as the plot unfolds. I award this book 8 out of 10.

Next I move on to the final bookcase in the Large Print section which was entirely populated with Mills and Boon books. I must confess I haven't read a Mills and Boon novel before. I must also confess that I am not particularly keen to do so, but in the interests of completing the project it is a necessary task I have to undertake, and I think I will have to read another as well much later on when I reach the romance section towards the end of my project.

I picked Shadowman pretty much at random I am have no way of knowing whether any of the Mills and Boon books is any better than another, because they all seem to have very similar storylines.