Nancy Tucker

"A tense, psychological novel about what propels one 8-year-old girl to murder, and the complex ways this past chases her down in later life."--Publisher's description.

The First Day of Spring

ariah 

“I didn't leave you, lovey,' I said into her shoulder. I didn't leave you.”

I love her down to the dark space around her bones, and I want to keep her, to have her with me, to smell her on my clothes. I want to tie tinsel in her hair at Christmas and put a new height mark on the door on her sixth birthday and slip into bed beside her before I go to sleep tonight. I want to carry on being her world.

I think this really spells out Julia’s fears right away and thought this was also probably something that a lot of people can relate to in early motherhood 

Lyndsy A

I didn’t stop wanting her when Molly was born; if anything, I wanted her more. Molly was my second heart for nine months, but when the nurses ripped her out I didn’t think of my body, robbed of its pendulum. I thought, “Twenty years ago, Molly was me. Twenty years ago, I was Mam,” and I felt closer to her than I had ever felt when we had lived in the same house, breathed the same air. When Molly cried I wanted to turn up on Mam’s doorstep with my throbbing head, sore chest, and bundle of baby. “Is this how you felt?” I wanted to ask. “Did you feel this mad? This tired? Did you feel like other people had a secret book you’d never been given? Is this why you were the way you were? Will she turn out like me?”

This one just made me really sad and thought it showed how the abuse she went through can still cause shame. Just made me really sad like this whole book 💀

We had been like a gone-wrong bird family, me and Mam: her out scavenging, me in the nest. She had only sometimes hacked up half-chewed worm parts for me, and whatever scraps she had given me I had swallowed down. I thought of it now and felt coldly degraded

The First Day of Spring quotes

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