On Chapel Sands

June 10, 2019
English author Cumming (The Vanishing Velàzquez) unravels the mystery surrounding her mother’s five-day disappearance in 1929, when she was three years old, in this intense family history. Cumming’s mother, Betty, was at a beach on England’s Lincolnshire coast with her mother when she was kidnapped. Five days later, she was quietly found and brought home. Who had taken Betty and why is not revealed until later in the book and is part of the mystery that Cumming slowly unpacks, though readers learn early on that Betty was adopted, a fact her adoptive parents, Vera and George Elston, hid from her. Secrets were big in the Elston family and in the village in which they lived, so much so that Betty didn’t learn about her own kidnapping for over half a century. Growing up, Betty’s domineering father tried to isolate her. “I only knew that George was angry, bronchitic, dictatorial; and that he was a liar,” Cumming writes. Betty’s life changed at 13 when a woman claiming to be her grandmother approached her. The encounter scarred Betty and led to shocking revelations. Cumming incorporates photos, letters, and her mother’s own words to tell the story. The book sags a bit in the middle as Cumming teases the core mystery, but the final third reads like a thriller. Questions and lies abound in this touching book about a daughter’s quest to help her aging mother uncover her true identity.

June 28, 2019

Cumming (The Vanishing Velazquez) deftly tells the story of her mother Betty's childhood abduction in this latest work. Part memoir, part family history, Cumming examines her mother's unique childhood, including her abduction from an English beach in 1929 at age three and return home just a few days later, and finding out decades later, after a childhood raised in isolation, that Betty's parents had been hiding the fact that their daughter was both kidnapped and adopted, with her name changed from Grace to Betty. Cumming uses her skills as a writer and investigator as fuel to seek out the truths surrounding her mother's childhood, and how those events have rippled through the family ever since, especially since no one was ever accused of the crime. The use of photographs and art assist readers in visualizing the story and add depth to the characters. VERDICT With its unique combination of artistry, investigation, and memoir, this story is likely to appeal to a wide range of readers and is recommended as a general purchase for large collections.--Mattie Cook, Flat River Community Lib., MI

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2019
The art critic for the Observer explores family secrets stretching back 90 years.In the fall of 1929, writes Cumming (The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, 2016), a 3-year-old girl "was playing by herself with a new tin spade" on a Lincolnshire beach, her mother at her side--until, for a moment, the girl dropped out of her sight and was coaxed away by someone watching nearby, "so fast that she couldn't have got anywhere near the water." The girl, who would become the author's mother, the artist Betty Elston, did not drown; she turned up a few days later. Cumming probes her memory and investigates family albums in an attempt to determine what happened. What she turns up is a secret betrayal on the part of her grandfather to which her grandmother must have surrendered, thinking it "her Christian duty" but likely having had no choice but to do so. The facts of the story and their resolution command attention, but in the end, they're less interesting than the author's process of thinking about them. As she looks at photo albums with the eye of a scholarly detective, she discerns patterns of gaps and absences, sees eyes averted, a countenance "reluctant or evasive," and reads between the lines. Those photographs from the past connect generations in a one-way conversation even as present-day readers, saturated in color, look at monochrome photographs as if the world of their subjects were colorless too: "The mind knows this is false," writes Cumming, "but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past; makes the past look even more distant." Her nuanced, pensive account restores reality and vitality to figures from out of the past, making them meaningful while uncovering their secrets. A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie's mill.

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Starred review from August 1, 2019
At three years old, while playing on a quiet beach on the North Sea near her home in a little British town, Betty Elston, the mother of art critic Cumming (The Vanishing Vel�zquez, 2016), was kidnapped for five days and then returned to her adoptive parents. Elston knew nothing about the kidnapping, or about her life before she was adopted by a stern couple in their late forties, until she was well into middle age. She was content to let the incident rest in the past, but Cumming, her only child, was fascinated by it and by her mother's early life. Cumming persuaded her mother to record her memories, which she uses here, along with interviews with still-taciturn surviving friends and neighbors and photographs taken by her mother's adoptive father, to piece together a credible version of a complex story. Sensitive, tender, elegiac, quietly mysterious, and as much the work of a thoughtful, informed imagination as of historical fact, the book profits from Cumming's keen ability to extract meaning from the most seemingly casual of photographs. This is also a model of how to write a compelling biography of the childhood of an ordinary person. Memoir and biography lovers will be riveted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)