I've read two previous novels by Charlotte Butterfield - The Second Chance and The Sister Switch - and really enjoyed them both. So I was excited to read The Life I Didn't Plan.
Pregnant at seventeen (following a brief romance on a school trip to France), and having become a mother at eighteen, Beth has spent her life looking after others - daughter Maisie, and the terminally ill patients she cares for as a palliative carer.
What Beth hasn't managed quite so well is forging any kind of life of her own. Forced to leave school due to her pregnancy, the career as a midwife that she dreamt of never got off the ground, and her love life has been an almost complete non-starter.
Now, with nineteen-year-old Maisie away at university, life is about to develop in unexpected ways. A New Year's Eve callout to a dying elderly man takes an extraordinary turn. And it looks like it's time to finally track down Maisie's father, the boy who never answered Beth's letters...
Can Beth finally make a life of her own - even if it's not the one she hoped for at seventeen? And would that life have been the right one for her, anyway?
Sometimes the future we plan isn't nearly as beautiful as the one we never saw coming.
A great read with an engaging and relatable main character.
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