Blushing is for Sinners

Paisley mill girl, Jean McParland, is increasingly frustrated by her humdrum job and longs for a better future for herself and her daughter, Ava. So when old flame Billy re-enters her life, she's easily seduced by his dreams of escape - an association which will have disastrous results. Fifty years later, and Ava is now a high-flying executive in Vancouver. But the death of her aunt, who brought her up, triggers a chain of events which, ultimately, leads her back to the town of her birth...
Jean McParland is emblematic of many women of her time, when the Kirk and their self-appointed "unco guid" exerted social control through a respectability that kept people in their place, turned mothers into big sisters and grandmothers into parents.  Families were separated, supposedly to give children a better life, but more often to remove a living reminder of gullibility and deceit.  Sinners paid for their sins with more than blushes. This book is about the effects of separation, loss and the ways family secrets can dominate the present, how lies and deception are maintained across the generations and the terrible consequences when the truth escapes.
Carl MacDougall I could not put this book down! The tension running through each page kept me turning over, even though I was telling my sleepy self "right one more chapter and lights out." Each character has their own unique personality but I was particularly drawn to Jean who reminded me of my own mother who worked in Singer Sewing Factory in the 1950's. I could identify with that need to escape as if you're life depends on it. ?Donna Campbell?Tracy has brought all her poet's skills into her prose to create a touching and humorous evocation of time and place and life.
There's not a superfluous word in sight as she immediately draws you in to both strands of the story. Jean in 1960s Paisley, and her grown-up daughter Ava in the Canada of the 21st Century; both women struggling with unhappy situations, both searching for solutions, both making mistakes. But it's also a book full of genuine warmth and concern for the characters and their predicaments, a cautionary tale of not letting love go to waste.
Blushing is for Sinners is an instant Paisley classic. Graham FultonFaces glow and bodies feel the heat in this romantic thriller. A good old-fashioned page-turner, the book's strength is its insider's portrait of a Scottish town, with something of the dark malignity of Douglas Brown's House with the Green Shutters about it. Dave Manderson