Let's start over. This is what Vero's young son says whenever his day goes awry or there's a fight. Starting over is the most prominent theme that runs throughout Between.
Vero and Shane are married with two young sons. When Vero starts falling apart at the seams, overwhelmed by her marriage and motherhood, Shane suggests hiring a nanny to help her cope. Hiring a nanny is supposed to help Vero start over, to have time to focus on her work and on herself, but the entire idea stresses Vero out. She questions the idea of hiring someone from a foreign country to do her work as a mother. Soon she reaches a breaking point and agrees to her husband's suggestion. She interviews a few nannies over the phone and chooses Ligaya (or Lili as she comes to be known) - a woman from the Philippines who is starting over herself.
While Vero's been going through her breakdown in Canada, Ligaya's been in Hong Kong working for the strict Poon family. She sleeps in a closet and phones her family in secret since she isn't even supposed to own a cell phone. She had to work in Hong Kong for a year in order to be eligible to work in Canada. When she's put in her time there and gets the call that she's got the job in Canada to work for Shane and Vero, she's excited to start over in this new country. She's hoping for better living conditions and nicer employers than she's experienced in Hong Kong, but her heart really lies with her family back home in the Philippines - they're the reason she's living abroad. They simply ran out of money and opportunities in her homeland, so she's been forced to work abroad and sends gifts and money home.
The points of view bounce back and forth between Vero and Ligaya. I liked the character, Ligaya, the most. She's trying her best to navigate a new country with a pretty significant language barrier, trying to respect the agency rules set out for proper nanny/employer relationships, while trying to balance the obvious tension between Vero and Shane. She does her best to give Vero space and develops a special relationship with the two boys. All the while, Ligaya holds onto a significant secret about her life back home, so she's trying to compartmentalize her two different lives on different sides of the world.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to feel less guilty and also because she's feeling a bit stranded in life, Vero wants nothing more than to be friends with Ligaya, rather than being just her boss. However, much to Vero's annoyance, because she's so intent on following the rules, Ligaya mostly maintains a professional distance.
There are a couple of instances where the plot really veers out of the everyday. I found these scenes just made Vero's character seem more disjointed. It seems she went from silently seething at her husband and then doing a total 180 and was doing everything she could to please him and was generally completely unpredictable overall. I suppose these instances maybe just highlight how all over the place Vero's mindset's at, but I found her character just didn't flow quite as well as the others. I found her a bit hard to decipher.
Overall, it was a bit of a dark plot, but Ligaya provided a lot of light. She was the anchor for the unmoored: she provided stability for Vero and her well-being, she did her best to handle the tension between Vero and Shane, to provide balance between motherhood and the children, between her family at home and the one she looked after in Canada. The name Ligaya translates to happiness, and it was happiness that I was hoping Ligaya would find after all she sacrificed for herself and for everyone else. She truly deserved to start again with a smile on her face and happiness in her heart.
Book cover rating: 3/5
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