DELPHINE JONES TAKES A CHANCE

A 28-year-old single mother in London who had a child at 17 starts to make small changes to get out of the rut she's in.

Delphine Jones didn’t mean to get pregnant at 16, but it happened anyway. Now 28, she's still living in the basement flat she grew up in with her father, her mother having died when she was just 13. Only now, she shares the tiny bed and small room with her 11-year-old daughter, Emily Josephine Jones. Delphine is stuck in a life she didn’t expect and cannot see her way out of. Her daughter is the love of her life: precocious, wickedly smart, and loving in all the best ways. But Delphine still can’t quite reconcile the bilingual, piano-playing, top English literature student focused on the future she was with whom she has become: a fired barista scraping money together to try to put dinner on the table. The story follows two streams of Delphine’s life: the year of her love affair with learning and her first boyfriend, which led up to her pregnancy, and the year that the mental fog clears and she starts to reclaim her life with her daughter’s help. Hard work is a given, of course—both emotional and physical. But rather than staying in the box that she has lived in for 12 years, Delphine takes a chance on new things, fun things, and things that have the potential of improving her life and situation for the future. Author Morrey’s second foray into fiction is an uplifting, earnest book with layered, complicated characters.

A cozy story that accepts people for who they are, warts and all, and celebrates the hard work that true change requires.