Book Review Saturday – ‘Red Ink’

One of the main reasons behind my purchase of ‘Red Ink’ was the fact that it is published by Hot Key Books. I’ve only recently become aware of this publisher, but I already know how high their standards are; all the books I’ve picked up from Hot Key have been very good indeed, and this one is no different. They’re well-written, and edgy, and fresh, and slightly off-beat, in all the best possible ways.

Image: forbookssake.net

‘Red Ink’ tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl coming to terms with awful loss, and trying to rebuild her life, and herself. It takes us from London to Crete and back again, describing the differing landscapes with such precise and poetic language that we can feel the streets under our feet, see the sparkling blue sea, hear the passing traffic, smell the warm dust in the air. The writing in this book is a living thing. It is the voice of our narrator; for the duration of the novel, we are her. It absorbed me completely.

Our narrator has to live under the heavy burden of a name she despises, and this is the point at which we’re first introduced to her. We learn her name is Melon Fouraki, and we learn that her mother is dead. At the beginning of the novel, Melon is living with her late mother’s partner, Paul, who – wonderfully – is portrayed throughout as a good, kind, compassionate and caring man, who wishes to look after Melon and keep her safe. He loves her, and he loved her mother, and his grief is as real and as raw as Melon’s, though we experience it at a remove. Throughout the novel, people raise eyebrows over Melon and Paul’s relationship, projecting sordid and distasteful things onto it; this serves to make their bond seem even more precious, and it was one of the things about the novel I enjoyed the most. Of course, Paul’s guardianship over Melon causes her irritation at first, and she rails against his efforts to show her the parental love which, in many ways, she has always lacked, but one thing she always has for him is respect. He is a great character, and I loved what Mayhew did with him.

Melon herself is a wonder. Funny, abrasive, full-colour, so real you can nearly hear her voice narrating her story to you, I absolutely loved her. She’s one of the most convincing characters I’ve ever met, and this is largely because Mayhew tackles the concept of grief so well. Melon obviously loved her eccentric, slightly batty mother, and she is devastated by her sudden and tragic death, but at the book’s outset she is consumed with anger, and doesn’t even realise it. Her mother’s death is ‘no big deal’; she doesn’t have any feelings on the matter, besides the fact that she feels like there’s a brick lodged in her ribcage. As the story goes on, the reality of her loss begins to hit home and we walk by her side as she processes the stages of her grief. Every step of it is utterly believable. She finds herself feeling normal at times, then feeling guilty for feeling normal, as if it’s a betrayal of her mother’s memory to spend the occasional day unbowed by grief; she makes jokes to cover her own awkwardness and that of other people in discussing loss, and death, and sorrow. It’s one of the most touching, and true, expositions of grieving that I’ve ever read.

Alongside Melon’s present-day journey, we also have ‘The Story’ – the story that Melon’s mother has told her all her life, her ‘origin myth’. It is the story of her father, and how Melon was conceived in Crete, and the heartbreaking romance of her parents’ separation. Everything about Melon’s life, from her strange name to her father’s absence, are explained away in beautiful terms by ‘The Story’, which Melon has heard so often that she can recite it by heart. It is, in real terms, the only thing her mother left her. It is her legacy. In an attempt to find out more about herself and her family and to see the real landscape behind the story, Melon traces her mother’s life back to where it began – in Crete. The results of this search go to the foundation of Melon’s own life. She learns the truth behind ‘The Story’, and it begins to be retold.

There is a lot to like in this book. Besides the characterisation, I enjoyed the structure, which flips back and forth in time. Some chapters describe Melon’s life before her mother’s death, some after, which builds up a gradual picture of their relationship. The language is pitch-perfect, the settings are fantastic, the depictions of family life are excellent. It is full of love and loss and truth, and it tells a strong story. There was one aspect of the book that I didn’t like so much, but I’m not going to give it away here, of course; one aspect of the conclusion of Melon’s story felt unnecessary to me, and a little too ‘pat’. If you’ve read it, you probably know what I mean, and if you haven’t, I hope you’ll read it in an attempt to find out.

Read this book. Even if it’s only to have images like this created in your mind!
Image: finestgreece.gr

Happy weekend, and happy reading. I’d love to know what’s currently on your Bookish Radar. Feel free to share in the comments!

Book Review Saturday – ‘Heroic’

Sometimes, it’s the books you buy on a whim that can turn out to be the most meaningful, and the ones you’ll treasure for years. ‘Heroic’, by Phil Earle, is one of those books for me.

Image: thefemalebookworm.com

It wasn’t actually me who chose this one – it was my husband. We were browsing through the children’s and YA shelves in a large bookshop a few weeks ago, and he handed it to me. ‘This looks interesting,’ he said. ‘I might actually read this myself.’

Well. That got my attention. My husband, read fiction? This must be some book!

I added it to my pile of to-be-purchased titles without really looking at it; I checked out the cover image, saw that it was a Penguin title (it’s great to have such trust in a publisher!) and was quite happy to fork over the money for it. Then, when it arrived back home with us, it took me a little while to get around to reading it; when I did, though, I wondered what had taken me so long.

‘Heroic’ is the story of Sonny McGann, primarily, though his brother Jammy is the other main narrative voice in the book. We read three or four chapters in Sonny’s voice, and then three or four in Jammy’s, and so on – the story unfolds through both their perspectives. Sonny and Jammy have grown up on the Ghost, a high-rise housing estate somewhere in London, the focal point (and only un-graffittied part) of which is a large statue of the soldiers at the centre of the housing units. This outsize memorial was raised to commemorate the men of the area who’ve given their lives, down through the years, in the service of the Army, and it’s often mentioned – as a meeting point, as a reference point, as a grounding image, and, finally, as an emotional focus – throughout the story. Life on the Ghost is not easy – fathers are absent or abusive, mothers are worked to exhaustion, unemployment among the young is rife, drug and alcohol abuse is rampant. In order to escape his life, and earn some money to help his mother keep the family together, Jammy enlists in the Army, and is deployed to Afghanistan along with his best friend and neighbour, Tommo.

Sonny is left to face the cauldron that is the Ghost. His sections of the story tell us of his struggles to keep away from crime and drug abuse, his love for Cam (the sister of Tommo), and his everyday life, full to the brim of frustration and rage. He wants to help his mother by trying to get some sort of job, but she wants him to stay at school; they both know, in any case, that being labelled as ‘a kid from the Ghost’ will make him unemployable, so their arguments are, in some ways, moot. His future looks grim, and his life is hard – it’s leavened only by the presence of the beautiful, gentle and compassionate Cam, whom he loves deeply. However, Cam – as a sister of one of ‘the gang’ – is supposed to be out of bounds; her relationship with Sonny must therefore be kept secret, and it is a huge source of stress for them both. Sonny’s friends are struggling as much, or more, than he is, particularly the enigmatic and troubled Hitch, and their efforts to carve out a living for themselves is painfully described.

Interspersed with this brutal vision of life, we read about Jammy’s experiences in Afghanistan. He does his best to take his friend Tommo under his wing, trying to keep him safe and sane amid the dust and terror, and he struggles with the reasoning behind their presence in Afghanistan to begin with. He learns the hard way about the drawbacks of trying to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of local people, the brutality both of the war and of the regime they are, allegedly, there to fight, and how risky it is to become close to the people you’re trying to protect. A scene in the middle of the book involving Jammy and an Afghani child almost literally stole my heart out of my chest and broke it; I had to close the book, put it aside, and weep for a good ten minutes. It is one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever read, made even more harrowing by the fact that similar events happen every day in reality. Eventually, Jammy returns from Afghanistan, but what he’s been through, and what he’s seen, mean that the man who comes back to the Ghost is not the same man who left. Jammy’s struggles to reintegrate, to slot back into life with his family and community, are unashamedly examined. The book particularly takes us into the heart of his relationship with Sonny, and how the brothers seem to have lost something precious that once bonded them to one another.

Cam, Sonny’s girlfriend, becomes a pivotal character in trying to heal the brothers’ relationship despite the fact that she is dealing with her own unimaginable loss. The boys’ mother, driven to distraction by the life she is leading and the future that faces her sons, is a strong and loving figure, but it takes her love and Cam’s together to have any impact on Jammy and Sonny. They have to realise how much they share and how deep are the ties that bind them before they can reforge their relationship, but their attempts to do this are almost too much for either of them to take.

‘Heroic’ pulls no punches. It is a visceral novel, full of pain and anger; the characters’ rage spills forth from the pages and their tightly-bounded lives struggle to break free from between the lines of text. I didn’t just read this book – I lived it, I breathed it, I felt the strictures of the Ghost and the front-line both. I willed the characters on, frustrated by Sonny’s immaturity and pigheadedness as much as by Jammy’s inability to admit he needed help, horrified by Hitch’s struggle with heroin and Cam’s experiences at the hands of her father, and deeply moved by the love between them all, and their willingness to do whatever it took to save one another from destruction. Having said all this, I don’t mean to imply that ‘Heroic’ is a bleak book – it isn’t, really. The desperation and pain of the characters’ lives is always counterpointed with their love for, and devotion to, one another. You could almost say this is a book about brotherhood – not just the blood ties that bind Sonny and Jammy, and which end up, in a way, being weaker than the ties between Sonny and his friends, and Jammy and his comrades – but the brotherhood, or the family links, that bind all of us together, wherever we live or whatever we face in life.

In short, this book is a marvel. I’m so pleased my husband spotted it, and that I bought it, because it’s probably not the sort of book I’d have picked up for myself. Now, I know better. I’ll be looking out for the rest of Phil Earle’s books, and recommending them highly to everyone I come across.

Happy Saturday, y’all. Get reading!