Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Cactus

Title: The Cactus
Author: Sarah Haywood
Published: May 7th 2019 by Park Row
Format: Paperback, 384 pages
Genre: Women's Fiction

Cacti is not prickly to keep invaders away but to allow it to thrive in the harshest of environments.

I am not going to go as far as to say Susan Green is on the spectrum, but I do tend to wonder since she has very precise ways of looking at life. Ways which are orderly with no room for emotion or the feelings of others. She has well throughout life plans and when she discovers, at the ripe old of 45, she is pregnant, and with the recent passing of her mother, Susan is a befuddled mess.

Susan and Richard had a mutually satisfying relationship. He was a man that she had met a decade or so previously through a lonely heart ad. They laid out their relationship rules, complete with an understanding there would be no sharing of their personal lives and settled on a purely physical relationship with mutually agreed upon evenings out. All organized and precise the way adults should behave. She never anticipated a baby would enter the picture, and when it did, she quickly ended their relationship determined to keep her independence.

Her relationship with her widowed mother was of begrudgingly mutual respect if they did not see each other frequently. Susan’s brother Edward, on the other hand, was a thorny nuisance and when her mother’s will was read, and Susan did not receive what she believed to be her fair share, she did what any other rational legally trained person would do -- she gathered her documents and went to court.

Refusing to give up her autonomy, yet needing the proceeds from the sale of her mother’s home, she reluctantly begins asking for help from the few people who are willing to get close to this prickly person who raises cacti. Then again, she doesn’t technically ask, they are the only people left in her life willing to see past the brusque exterior.

As her due date nears, and the court case is coming to a head, Susan encounters a shock she never prepared for. A secret so devastating it causes an emotional upheaval that will breakdown her walls and allow her to bond with Rob and Kate, letting in a life she had denied, and in turn, allowing Susan Green to forget the rules.

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