A coming-of-age story about abandonment, betrayal and inheritance. The prose is radiant and descriptive ... Lizzie is a sympathetic character, strong, capable and restless ... Livesey’s piercing and eloquent novel manages to convey the wonderful mysteries that life offers along the way.
Lizzie is a marvel of a character ... Engaging ... Livesey’s latest work is both more magical and more Earth-bound than what’s contained in the body of the novel ... In a tale rife with love and loss, Livesey makes clear, you can’t have one without the other. But maybe — just maybe — love wins.
The Scotswoman is such a graceful, distinctive writer ... Lizzie is able to use her premonitions to head off disaster, but one of the wisest things about Livesey's book is that it insists that being able to (sometimes) predict the future won't save messy, foolish humans from stumbling into it anyway.
The third-person narration, often charmingly populated with historical detail, exposition and dialogue, leaves little space for Lizzie’s interiority to develop on the page. This makes for tricky reading, because The Road From Belhaven seems like an ode to 19th-century character-driven novels. But Belhaven is lacking either a contemporary reflexivity or an urgency that would propel us through the emotional tribulations of its heroine ... Lacking intensity or suspense, Livesey’s novel is most accomplished in its presentation of history. The story brims with vivid observations of 19th-century Scottish life ... The Road From Belhaven is Victorian Scotland seen through heather-tinted spectacles, and its heroine is unfortunately wrapped in a layer of narrative cotton wool. Livesey has landed on an intriguing premise, but I felt myself yearning for something to help the book’s emotional arrows land. Without that, the novel risks reading like a sketch, awaiting embellishment and texture to bring it alive.
Livesey’s vibrant imagery and profound compassion deliver a tragic coming-of-age novel that resonates with her gifted protagonist’s resourcefulness in the face of stunning faithlessness.
