It’s been a while since I’ve read a book quite like The Married Girls by Diney Costeloe and as such I found this to be a beautiful book, a real breath of fresh air. It was the first novel of Diney’s that I have ever had the pleasure of reading before and all I can say is that I really regret not having discovered her wonderful stories before now.
Within this glorious book, Diney transports us to the village of Wynsdown just after the war where for two women, Charlotte and Daphne, there’s a lot going on. Now happily married with two children, the last person Charlotte was expecting to return to town was Harry a man who she was once very close to and who it seems she is still deeply concerned about. Meanwhile Daphne has a terrible secret and one that, if discovered, could ruin everything she has worked so hard to achieve with Felix. As women who are both different from eachother in many ways, these two women both have something in common in that they both have a past they would much rather forget. This is a story about just what happens when the past catches up with them as all too often happens in life.
The Married Girls is the second in a series of books and before reading it I highly recommend reading the first book, The Girl With No Name, before. This was something I really wish I’d done as whilst I thought all the characters I met throughout The Married Girls were wonderful, I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing out on some valuable background information. There wasn’t one character that I liked more or less than the others as they all had a vital and important role to play in the story. I certainly found it fascinating to read of the lives of the characters and follow them as they experienced all that they did after the war.
Despite having not read the first book in the series, I couldn’t help but love every minute that I got to spend reading The Married Girls. Undoubtedly this is all thanks to Diney’s wonderful way of writing a story in a way that really did seem so effortless. I’m the sort of the person that loves a book with plenty of description and this was a book that certainly delivered plenty of that, with it being entirely possible to form a mental picture in my head of everything that was happening. With so much going on throughout, there was so much to hold my attention and keep me interested from beginning to end.
As a book that had a lot of depth and emotion to it, one that you could tell Diney had poured her heart and soul into to make it as successful as it was, I ended The Married Girls feeling so glad that I had the opportunity to read this book. It will be very interesting to see whether or not there will be a third book in the series and if so the direction in which the author takes things next. Either way, one thing that’s for certain is that I’ll definitely be back to read more written by Diney in the future.
