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Ruby's Lepel (2000)

by Anna Lawrence Pietroni(Favorite Author)

3.21 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

9022959848 (ISBN13: 9789022959848)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

review 1: I really enjoyed this book. It's fresh, original, quaint, and beautifully written.The writing style invites the reader into the complex dynamics and the hidden mysteries of people who've lived all their lives in the same industrial village.The story is well crafted and characters carefully developed. A sense of the mythical enriches the narrative. Throughout the story, the motif of a hook is artfully employed.It's something of a clever ploy to orient a mystery tale from the perspective of a young girl, gullible though confident in her assumed capacity to impact the decisions and lives of those around her. This creates quite a veiling of what's really happening in the narrative.The cruelty of suspicion and small mindedness pervades this tale as betrayal becomes the central ... moretheme.
review 2: In this, the author's debut novel, mermaids, myths and mystery are the order of the day. It is set in 1930s England, in the small town of Cradle Cross in the heart of the Black Country in the Midlands. Surrounded by canals, brimming over with superstition, Cradle Cross is like a prison for our narrator, 12 year old Ruby Abel Taylor. Ruby dreams of new horizons but her crabbed grandmother Annie has forbidden her to go near water after losing her husband and child to the sea so she's fated to lead a stifled, claustraphobic existence until one day Isa Fly comes to town. Isa, half-blind with a mane of white hair, becomes a scapegoat when things start to go wrong in the community - the workers at the local button factory are laid off and valued items start to go missing. Soon rumours of witchcraft are rife.The author certainly knows this area like the back of her hand and the inclusion of Black Country dialect enhances the otherworldliness and the seclusion of this community which has lost so many of its menfolk during the war. Indeed the principal characters are all female and all strong-willed and determined, including the idealistic Ruby, the grief-stricken widows of the Ruth and Naomi Society, the worldly-wise Oxbridge graduate Truda Blick, the sinister black clad woman known as Blackbird who harbours a grudge against the charismatic Isa Fly.On the one hand there is a lot going on in this novel and it took me until about a third in before I settled into it. There is no doubt that this is a well written, atmospheric novel with fairytale elements but I can't help thinking that a bit of judicious pruning and restraint would have created a sharper, homogeneous read. This debut shows a lot of promise and I look forward to reading more from Anna Lawrence Pietroni. less

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