On Chapel Sands
On Chapel Sands by @lauracummingart
Reviewed by Mimi
📕📕📕
When a child is abducted from a beach in 1929 there was no way of knowing years later how the daughter of that child would undertake an investigation to uncover the story of what happened and why. Through the delicate study of pictures and the piecing together of fragments of stories from her family, Cumming does discover what happened to her mother. You can tell that she is an art critic with the comparisons she makes between family photographs and mainstream, fine art in key points through the book.
It is an interesting historical account more than anything else and does make you question the decisions made on behalf of their children. Is it always in their best interests or is it sometimes self-serving? What is family? Is it your blood or the people that raise you? This has been a much-celebrated book but for me, it wasn’t the tension of a crime that created the pull, more the discovery of a mother’s childhood through the eyes of her daughter.
