This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Kay Brooks
Sue Bowl is at a very impressionable age; she is not a girl anymore but not quite a woman either. Trying to find her way in the world is proving to be difficult, especially since her mother committed suicide and her father seems too obsessed with his mistress, Ivana, to pay any attention to her grieving. Luckily, her elderly Aunt Coral is on hand to offer guidance. Sue moves in to her aunt’s crumbling mansion, where she soon makes friends with the Admiral and Delia – the other inhabitants. On her journey to womanhood, Sue is about to learn many a lesson about friendship, family, loyalty and love.
Set in 1987, the story evokes a simpler era when Sue Bowl, a seventeen year old with ambitions of becoming an accomplished writer, is on a journey of self-discovery. The novel is written mainly through the eyes of Sue in her diary entries, but also goes back in time to extracts from her Aunt Coral’s ‘Commonplace Book’ which was written when she herself was a child. Sue’s family life is far from simple, with her father spending as much time with his girlfriend as he can while Sue continues to try and understand her mother’s death. She blames her father’s dalliances with Ivana for her mother’s desperate act of suicide and is determined to distance herself from him as a result. Her Aunt Coral, having been born much earlier than her mother, is more like a grandmother than an aunt, but is delightfully young in spirit. All the characters are very quirky and even those who at first meeting seem like villains, have some redeemable qualities.
To add an element of realism to Sue’s diary entries, she often attempts to use sophisticated vocabulary but gets it wrong. At first, this confused me until I realised it was deliberate and the results are often quite amusing. It did, unfortunately, take me a while to get used to the style, which I found quite wordy and tiresome at times. Sue is very easy to like and I found similarities between my younger self and her naïve, inquisitive nature that often gets her into trouble. I found myself feeling quite maternal towards her. Her all-consuming crush on her boss’s son, Icarus, who is completely unsuited to her, made me want to protect her. She is also very loving and is determined to help her aunt out of financial trouble though she herself is inexperienced in this area.
The best parts of the novel for me were the meetings of the Egham Hirsute Group, which is the writing group set up for the inhabitants of Aunt Coral’s mansion and their friends. The characters reveal further facets of their natures along with their desires and feelings through the extracts they write to share with the group.A story about growing up, learning the value of friends and family and experiencing the delight of discoveries along the way!
6 /10