Today’s team review is from Noelle, she blogs here https://saylingaway.wordpress.com
Noelle has been reading The Covenant by Thorne Moore
![The Covenant by [Thorne Moore]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61aBNtoTx9L.jpg)
The Covenant is a powerful novel which gobsmacked me with the fierce emotions of its characters and the immutable future of unending work and forced acceptance of their fate, by woman in the period of this story. This is a prequel to the author’s best-selling A Time for Silence, and is a must read.
Written in first person, the author has created in Leah Owen, the middle daughter of a farmer in Wales at the close of the 19th century, a woman burdened by both love and duty. Her father, Tom Owen, is a tenant farmer on twenty-four acres, one rood and eight perches of stony, hilly
land, and together with his oldest son, barely ekes out a subsistence for his family. The farm –Cwmderwen (and I wish I could pronounce it!) and its house are very real characters in the story, setting a grim, rundown background as the result of debt and poor harvest.
Leah has hopes. As the middle daughter, she will be able to marry and leave Cwmderwen to lead her own life. Her oldest sister, a strangely quiet and dour woman, will remain behind to care for her parents. When the oldest son Tom dies, largely because of the ignorance of his father, the father, always pious, becomes a religious zealot. He drives his lazy youngest son, Frank, away. When both the oldest and youngest daughter marry and her mother dies, Leah is left to take care of her increasingly maniacal father, even when love comes her way. She is forced to follow a path of servitude and disappointments to a grim future. Tom Owen’s grandson, John – son of the wastrel Frank – becomes a miniature of his grandfather, claiming his covenant with God in keeping the farm and determined to keep the increasingly unproductive farm.
What possible future does Leah have? Can she remain dutiful, even to Frank and her nephew, bound as she is by the community, her church and custom? And how can she survive when her every dream is crushed by her family.
The author does an impressive job creating a background of isolated and rural Pembrokeshire, the changing seasons and vicissitudes of farming. The detail never becomes heavy but is integral to the story. Her ability to create depth in her characters, their beliefs and piety, and the changes and occasional joys in their lives is exceptional. The reader lives in Leah’s being and the feelings are at times overwhelming.
This is a book with a wallop, and I recommend it as an exception read.
The Owens are tied to this Pembrokeshire land – no-one will part them from it.
Leah is tied to home and hearth by debts of love and duty – duty to her father, turned religious zealot after the tragic death of his eldest son, Tom; love for her wastrel younger brother Frank’s two motherless children. One of them will escape, the other will be doomed to follow in their grandfather’s footsteps.
At the close of the 19th century, Cwmderwen’stwenty-four acres, one rood and eight perches are hardwon, the holding run down over the years by debt and poor harvest. But they are all the Owens have and their rent is always paid on time. With Tom’s death a crack is opened up and into this chink in the fabric of the family step Jacob John and his wayward son Eli, always on the lookout for an opportunity.
Saving her family, good and bad, saving Cwmderwen, will change Leah forever and steal her dreams, perhaps even her life…
The Covenant is the shocking prequel to the bestselling A Time For Silence.
Rosie Amber 