Portrait of Stella

From the blurb, I was expecting a sweet historical romance with a touch of mystery, and I'm not sure I'd catergorise it as any of those genres. I would call it a good old fashioned sweeping family saga. I'm not complaining, mind you, as I enjoyed the book immensely. The book's narrator is the Stella from the title's daughter, Jemima, who sets out to discover the truth about her father when a government employee questions the authenticity of her birth certificate. The story slowly unfolds as Jemima travels to various places in England, New Zealand, and South Africa. We learn how Stella is linked to just about every other character the writer introduces. (I did like this; it annoys me when writers introduce characters for no apparent reason.) A lot of the action is told via flashbacks, with the year marked in the title of each. I did not find this distracting at all, and the placement of the flashbacks was done well enough that the story continued to flow seamlessly. Wuthrich's writing lacks pretension and is easy to read. However, I do believe, due to the scope of the plot, the book is extremely ambitious. Apart from the various characters and settings, the timeline of the plot calls for scenes set just prior to and during WW2, to just following that war when the festering illness that would eventually become Apartheid was emerging, to 1983 when South Africa was fully steeped in that same civil rights insanity. In fact, the novel could have easily been cut up into a series of separate books concentrating on just one set of characters at a time. (I especially liked the plot involving a character named Sannie, and would have happily read an entire book focusing on her life.) I really liked the book and would recommend it.

Jemima gets the shock of her life when she gets a very official letter from Immigration asking her to contact them when she applies for a passport. Apparently, her birth certificate is a forgery, there is no proof that her father was born in the UK and hence she is looked at with suspicion.

Jemima's mother has passed away and it is only her grandmother, old and frail who may be able to help Jemima to put the pieces of her life together. Unravelling it a piece at a time, Jemima comes across a puzzle spread over South Africa, New Zealand and Britain and a conspiracy on the part of several people who have kept the pieces so well hidden that it takes a lot of detective work for Jemima to find out that not only was her father not who he said he was, she has a sister, a host of relations plus the fact that she is classified as "colored" in apartheid South Africa.
Set in an era towards the end of WWII, with South Africa being at its nastiest on the apartheid question, the problems of mixed race are very clearly and bluntly described and it is horrifying. The effects of the regime which did its best to keep to a "whites only" policy were horrible and how the rest of the world despite the sanctions, just seemed to look the other way is significant. So many issues facing everyone that one tends to ignore some of them and pretend they do not even exist.

Family sagas are for me, particularly interesting. Coming from a very small unit, I love these large extended families with strong familial connections and bonds. This was one of those stories which held me enthralled right to the end. Each character was wonderful, some of them disgusting but still all connected to each other and part of the main story.

Would highly recommend this book to all lovers of a good story, well written. Never mind the family saga and the historical background.