THE ROAD FROM BELHAVEN by Margot Livesey

I expected more from Margot Livesey than this tired plot.  Scottish teenage farm girl Lizzie falls for city boy Louis and becomes pregnant.  She is at first elated, assuming that Louis will marry her right away.  Wrong.  He wants to finish his apprenticeship as a tailor, and that’s three years away.  I don’t know if Lizzie is naïve or just not very smart, but she has a knack for making really bad judgment calls.  She abandons her daughter to the child’s great-grandparents, as she runs back to Louis after having a vision of him with another woman.  Trying to hold on to her man is obviously more important than the well-being of her child, and I just couldn’t sympathize with Lizzie anymore.  To her credit, she is spunky and a hard worker, but nothing can redeem her, in my opinion, from choosing her lover over her child, and I don’t think that the author makes a good case for us readers to feel that Lizzie deserves a second chance.  Her visions have always proven to predict some unfortunate future event, but these visions seem superfluous to the plot, except in one case in which her vision actually allows for advance preparation to prevent tragedy and loss of life.  I view magical realism such as this as something of a cop-out for the author to solve a plot problem that could be better handled in a realistic manner.