He does however have some very real issues. Eight year old Henry Aird, who’s imagination and the occasional misunderstanding causes him to worry enormously. Unusually, we follow a very young character. She worries about everyone and frequently tries to help, without interfering. Even if she believes someone is doing something wrong, she accepts that they are their own person with their own mind and tells no one what to do. Someone who will listen and make no judgements.

Vi is the sort of character many of us probably need in reality. We start off with Violet Aird, or Vi as she is known, who seems to be a fairly central character and somewhat involved in everyone’s life. Throughout we follow a big cast of characters but they’re generally all part of just two families. While the fact that Noel Keeling is the big attraction for many, including me, he is in fact a fairly minor character in September. We pick up on his life four years after The Shell Seekers, when he seems almost lonely and bored with his life. However, Noel’s feeling at the ends were relatively unexplored and he was the only one with any story left to tell, a character who’s future was open to change. There would be little point in writing a follow up, it would ruin the romance. Olivia made pretty good assumptions of what each character would now do and they were very convincing. In truth The Shell Seekers has never needed a proper sequel. It just features Noel Keeling, from that book. You can’t really call it a sequel to The Shell Seekers. September is a little hard to get in to, but I’d say it’s worth sticking to. When I finally finished it and tried to make notes, I had to think really hard to remember all the main points.

It took me a long time to read it this time around because of the many distractions. This was the second time I read September, although I love it and was reading it with great enthusiasm, when I was half way through tragedy struck and I was unable to read like normal. Please excuse the possible lack of passion in this post. When someone dies it turns out there are a lot of difficult decisions to be made and a lot of stuff to track down. A recent bereavement basically means I’ve done hardly any reading or writing recently.

First of all, my apologies for the long gap.

September rosamunde