Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn't, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her "pictures" foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it. Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything?
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.
