Author: Karen Foxlee
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
Rating: worthy
I picked up this novel thinking it had some supernatural or paranormal content. It doesn't, but I loved this when I began reading it. Refreshingly set in Australia, it's an easy read, interesting, and very well written. There's a skein of entertaining commentary pervading the story (at least to begin with - it takes a darker tone later), and I love that very much. There's no prologue and it isn't told in the first person! What’s not to love? Plus I love the name Karen Foxlee. Perfect.
On the topic of person and tense, this novel is curiously told in third person present which is a bit different from most novels, but it has what I initially took to be flashbacks, which are actually flash-forwards (and which are told in third person present, too), and it has flashbacks. Really a bit confusing. The main character is Rose Lovell and she's fifteen. I entered this novel hoping it would be significantly more entertaining than the previous novel with which I'd just contended, which also had a female protagonist named Rose. I would have named a daughter Rose had I a daughter to name: Holly Rose. But it was not to be.
Rose is fifteen and is befriended by schoolmate Pearl when she starts her first day at her new school. Pearl has (so she claims) "a highlighter dependency", and uses them extensively. She's even given to writing with her highlighters on Rose's arms and hands. Rose has started a new school rather frequently, and she keeps telling people she is only at this school for a short time, because she's so used to her father taking off to a new town and dragging her behind him. He's an alcoholic and hardly the most steadfast guy in the world. The novel continues in this vein, with Rose getting to know Pearl, starting to settle in to her life, fearful that her father will start drinking again and pull up his stakes. Pearl turns out to be a character all of herself, but surprisingly for me (who falls in love with side-kicks more often than with main characters), she didn't quite outshine Rose.
on page 34 Foxlee writes: "…so blue it was almost black...". This was the first phrase to which I took exception in her writing, and it’s really more of a quibble than a problem, but it is a writing issue, and since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading and reviewing, I’d be remiss not to address it! The problem, for me, with that phrase is that something cannot be so blue that it’s almost black. It can be so dark that it’s almost black, but the blueness (more generally 'colorfulness', and more properly known as chroma) and the darkness (effectively a brightness scale from white to black, also known as luma) are not the same thing. I don’t know if Foxlee knows this, and is just being obscure or perverse, or if she doesn’t really know what she's saying, which would be a bit disturbing. Neil Gaiman knows how to write it in Stardust. The overly dramatic phrase seized my attention away from what she was saying, but then maybe I'm just perverse! Otherwise her writing is excellent, I have to add. Hastily. Before you call for the people in the white coats to come for me....
The story is slow to move, and I found this mildly irritating, but not overly so. Rose eventually is lured into having Edie, supposedly a witch (see where the paranormal confusion arose?!), make her a dress: the midnight dress, in very dark blue (so dark it was almost blue!) for the harvest festival parade, and Rose lets herself be dragged into it (or dragged out for it! She normally wears pants and flannels, not dresses.) Rose is lured further by Edie into pretty-much making the dress herself, slowly, by degrees, one stitch at a time, as Edie tells parts of her life story to Rose while they work. I'm not sure what the point of this was, but is is loosely tied into other darker things which happen, and which climax (and unexpectedly for me!) at this very parade
So I finished this and have to say the ending which was threatening throughout the novel (via the flash-forwards) was not at all what I expected it to turn out to be, but it was a comfortable one - if a disturbing one. I recommend this novel as a worthy read, but ignore the cover: it has nothing whatsoever to do with any events in the novel! And therein lies one of the major advantages in self-publishing: you do your own stuff and don't have to put up with any crap foisted upon you by the publisber or the editor!
