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#BookReview #Ad The Girl from Simon’s Bay by Barbara Mutch

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The Girl From Simon's BayAbout the Book

1937. Louise Ahrendts, daughter of a shipbuilder, is at home in Simon’s Town, a vibrant community in the Union of South Africa, with a Royal Navy port at its heart. Louise dreams of becoming a nurse and in a world of unwritten, unspoken rules about colour, she has the strength to make it a reality.

The outbreak of the Second World War brings a man into Louise’s world who she is determined to be with – despite all the obstacles life and conflict throw in their way. But when a new troubled moment of history dawns, can they find their way back to each other?

Format: Paperback (416 pages)              Publisher: Allison & Busby
Publication date: 21st September 2017  Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Although her family are not well-off, Louise has an idyllic childhood growing up in sight of the sea where she swims most days or watches her friend, Piet, dive for shells. Located on the shores of False Bay in the shadow of the Simonsberg mountains, Simon’s Town is a fishing community and the location of a Royal Navy port that provides employment for many of the townspeople, including Louise’s father.  On the surface Simon’s Town is a multi-racial community with people of different colours and heritage living peacefully together. However, at a national level, the issue of race is never far away.

Louise’s parents see her future as finding a nice local boy and settling down to a life as wife and mother. However, Louise dreams of becoming a nurse: she wants to ‘fix’ people.  Her ambition seems doomed to failure from the beginning, not because of her educational achievements or her commitment but because she is ‘coloured’. As the Matron of False Bay Hospital to which she applies writes, ‘I must caution you that no coloured applicant from a Simon’s Town school has ever been accepted’.  However, Louise is not one to give up and eventually her persistence is rewarded. ‘Slowly, one person at a time, False Bay Hospital was learning to value my ability rather than scorning my background.’ Louise comes to believe that through the recognition of her nursing skills she has overcome the barriers of race, but as her mother cautions, ‘War has no time for a colour bar… The old ways will return in peacetime mark my words.’

Louise’s proficiency results in a secondment to the Royal Naval Hospital looking after men injured in the war, often critically. ‘This was no civilian establishment with a routine quota of tonsils and broken legs. This was nursing on the edge.’ It’s here that Louise meets Lieutenant David Horrocks with whom she instantly forms a bond as a result of their shared love of the sea and the landscape of the Cape peninsular.

Fraternisation between nurse and patient is frowned upon by the hospital establishment; a relationship between a white officer and a coloured woman is unthinkable.  As their relationship develops, Louise and David are forced to meet in secret. But fear of disclosure or the danger David faces whenever his ship goes to sea is not the only obstacle facing them, as Louise will discover. It will mean an agonising decision, the consequences of which will determine the future path of their lives, and of others too.

Two thirds of the way through the story moves to thirty years later and shifts from being predominantly a wartime romance to one about the impact of apartheid on families like Louise’s with previously mixed communities being dispersed and segregated according to colour. This was something I knew about vaguely but the author really brings to life the realities for individuals and communities. It means Louise is separated from the seascape she loves so much and which has been the backdrop to her life.  And the effective purging of non-white South Africans from official records, along with a reluctance by many to revisit events of the past, risks a connection being severed forever.

The Girl from Simon’s Bay is a moving love story set against the backdrop of war and social upheaval.

I received a review copy courtesy of Allison & Busby.

In three words: Tender, romantic, absorbing

Try something similar: Think of Me by Frances Liardet

Barbara MutchAbout the Author

Barbara was born and brought up in South Africa, the granddaughter of Irish immigrants. Before embarking on a writing career, she launched and managed a number of businesses both in South Africa and the UK. She is married and has two sons.

For most of the year the family lives in Surrey but spends time whenever possible at their home in the Cape. When not writing, Barbara is a pianist, a keen enthusiast of the Cape’s birds and landscape or fynbos.

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#BookReview The House of Birds by Morgan McCarthy

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TheHouseofBirdsAbout the Book

Oliver has spent years trying to convince himself that he’s suited to a life of money making in the city, and that he doesn’t miss a childhood spent in pursuit of mystery, when he cycled around the cobbled lanes of Oxford, exploring its most intriguing corners.

When his girlfriend Kate inherits a derelict house – and a fierce family feud – she’s determined to strip it, sell it and move on. For Oliver though, the house has an allure, and amongst the shelves of discarded, leather bound and gilded volumes, he discovers one that conceals a hidden diary from the 1920s.

So begins a quest: to discover the identity of the author, Sophia Louis. It is a portrait of war and marriage, isolation and longing and a story that will shape the future of the abandoned house – and of Oliver – forever.

Format: Paperback (464 pages)  Publisher: Tinder Press
Publication date: 1st June 2017 Genre: Dual Time

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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

It will come as no secret to regular followers of this blog that I sometimes find dual-time novels problematic, often finding myself more drawn to the past timeline than the present. However, in The House of Birds, the author manages to pull off the feat of making the two timelines both equally interesting and, indeed, interdependent.

The book moves between the present day story of Oliver, who finds himself rather adrift having quit a job he never really liked but not sure exactly what he wants to do next, and that of Sophia Louis whose life is documented in a journal Oliver discovers when clearing out the old house inherited by his girlfriend, Kate, who is off in New York pursuing a promotion opportunity. What starts as a project to fill a gap between jobs becomes something more as Oliver begins to feel a connection with the house, an obligation to save it even.  Unravelling the mystery of just who Sophia Louis was and what became of her provides Oliver with something to focus on, to draw him out of his apathetic state.

I liked the way Sophia’s story is revealed in instalments, in a way that is akin to a puzzle. Indeed, at one point, Oliver becomes irritated that her journal ends suddenly and, seemingly, unfinished. ‘Oliver was baffled and outraged. He felt keenly that Sophia – so aware of her reader had treated him unfairly.’ I also loved Sophia’s witty, teasing style of writing, often addressing her reader directly. But just who is Sophia’s intended reader? And why did she feel the need to hide the journal?

The story Sophia tells is one of disappointment, sadness, forbidden love, thwarted ambition, and the cruel and longlasting legacy of war, in this case the First World War. The latter is embodied in a character who is a tragic figure – ‘the grim king of a grim land’ – imprisoned in self-imposed silence and seeing the world as full of danger, of ‘black and smoking chaos’.

But how much of the story Sophia tells is true? Could her journal be fiction rather than fact? Indeed, Oliver ponders, ‘What if Sophia were a character in someone else’s novel?’ (I bet the author had a little chuckle to herself when she wrote that.)

As Oliver follows the trail Sophia has left, puzzling it out alongside the reader, it causes him to reflect on his own life. As he observes, ‘It’s ironic really. [Sophia] knew exactly what she wanted, but she couldn’t have any of it. I’ve had the opportunity to do whatever I want to do, and it seems like in almost thirty years I’ve only just managed to work out what that might be’. Oliver undergoes a kind of epiphany as he realises it’s not too late to pursue his childhood ambition, a path he was dissuaded from taking by his parents. In a way, he comes to feel he owes it to Sophia.

There is some beautiful descriptive writing, full of clever metaphors, such as this passage in which Oliver, as a young boy, first glimpses the rather neglected ‘House of Birds’ and its overgrown garden.

‘The darkly varnished ivy was tussling with the white bindweed over ownership of a sagging fence, while not far away, a honeysuckle, unchallenged, had claimed a garden table and swallowed a small tree. The lawn was an army massing under high spears, its regiments filing into the cracks between the paving stones to do battle with the dandelions. Above them the wisteria maintained a lordly rule over the house itself, loaded with it spectacular purple flowers, hundreds of fluttering confetti showers clamouring for the friskings of the bees.’

The House of Birds is the first novel I’ve read by Morgan McCarthy and, although she has written three previous novels, none of them appear to have been as positively received by readers as this one, and she has written nothing since. That’s a shame because I really enjoyed The House of Birds. I found the story enthralling, romantic without being sentimental and with some really clever touches. In fact, I imagined Sophia laughing to herself at an inspired one that occurs towards the end of the book.

In three words: Tender, intriguing, assured

Try something similar: The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne

Morgan McCarthyAbout the Author

Morgan McCarthy lives in Berkshire, and has been writing since primary school. She is the author of four novels: The Other Half of Me, The Outline of Love, Strange Girls and Ordinary Women, and The House of Birds. (Bio/photo: Publisher author page)

Connect with Morgan
Website |  Goodreads