Soft Touch — Maeve Haran

Like all her nice liberal friends Catherine Hope is determined to bring up her children with Tolerance, Understanding and without Fear. It seems to be working: Catherine's teenage daughter, Rachel, looks all set to get 'A's in everything.Suddenly Rachel wants to spend every weekend at her grandmother's country cottage, a place she had previously done everything she could to avoid. The reason? Marko: sultry, sexy countryside campaigner, out to save a threatened woodland from destruction, a woodland on the doorstep of Catherine's conventional and disapproving mother-in-law, Lavinia, who already reckons Catherine is a soft touch. What will Lavinia say apart from 'I told you so' about Rachel becoming a teenage road rebel?While Catherine's precious liberalism goes out of the window and she yearns to lock her daughter in her bedroom, Lavinia turns out to have hidden passions of her own. As the protest erupts around them, friendships are severed, loyalties divided and lives endangered. The dutiful daughter, model mother and gracious grandmother all find themselves changed for ever in this entertaining and moving story of the war between the generations.