Beginnings

Beginnings

Same Face, Different Place

by Helen J. Christmas

Review by Barry Boy

Beginnings, the first part of the series Same Face, Different Place by Helem J. Christmas, is a fictional novel, biographic in nature, that tells, in the third person, the story of the main proragonist, Eleanor, who is a seventeen year-old, whose mother has died, and whose father is a London gangster.

Eleanor’s father gets caught up in a turf war between his boss and an up-and-coming brutal interloper called Dominic Theakston.

Eleanor’s father has go away for a while to escape almost certain death, so leaves his daughter with his boss, who places her with a shady couple, just before he dies or gets killed.

Completely unprotected in the underworld, this is where things start to go seriously wrong for Eleanor. She spends a little while in an East-End brothel, where she too incurs Dominic’s wrath by escaping and helping a male, fellow prisoner to leave with her, which is the beginning of a beautiful but short relationship.

Beginnings is the first part of the saga of Eleanor.

Beginnings has been well, but not perfectly edited, and would benefit from a reread, as would most books. The title is appropriate, but the name of the series is not immediately so. One can only assume that some of the same characters also appear in later volumes. The same goes for the meaning of the cover. The characters are well-drawn and plausible, if some of the language is not. For example, Miss Christmas has several rooms ‘lingering’ behind doors, and two teenage white brothers calling each other ‘bro’ in the Seventies. I don’t remember any Brit, white or black using that term in those days.

I enjoyed Beginnings of the series Same Face, Different Place, by Helen J. Christmas, give it full marks and urge you to read it if you like this type of genre-spanning epic.