Exclusive interview with author Marcia Willett and a review of her contemporary novel The Prodigal Wife that explores abandonment issues
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed By Gabrielle Pantera
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV): “I became aware of Jolyon Chadwick, as if he was standing at my shoulder wanting to tell me more of their story,” says The Prodigal Wife author Marcia Willett. “I was slightly surprised, but after some months I realized that he wasn’t going away. I decided to listen to what he had to say.
“Many of the characters in The Prodigal Wife had already appeared in the Chadwick trilogy. The strangest thing was that a character about whom I had previously written a short story suddenly made her appearance as a major character in the book.”
The Prodigal Wife is a story of family and the intricacies of love lost and then found again over years. Willett embraces the feelings of each character, but the characters don’t leave a strong lasting impression. The plot moves along at a good pace and there’s a little mystery.
Baggage. Abandonment. Can two people focus on each other instead of the past? Jolyon is still getting over his mother’s abandonment when she left to marry her lover taking his brother Ed with her. Henrietta blames her mother Cordelia for cheating on her father, causing him to abandon her and leave the country to start a new family. When Jolyon and Henrietta fall in love their friends and family are cautiously optimistic. Can they be happy together?
Willett says a great deal of research for The Prodigal Wife had already been done while writing the trilogy, that the area in which the new characters Cordelia and her daughter Henrietta lived and how they worked was new. “I had to be very careful that the balance of the book was right for both old and new readers. Too much information about the Chadwicks would bore the old readers, too little and the new ones might be confused.”
At this time The Prodigal Wife isn’t being adapted for film or television.
Willett is currently working on a novel set on the River Tamar.
Willett lives in an old longhouse in a tiny village in Devon in the West Country. She was born in a small village in Somerset.
The Prodigal Wife by Marcia Willett. Trade Paperback, 336 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin; First Edition edition (January 18, 2011), Language: English, ISBN: 9780312672294
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