Tag: NetGalley

#BookReview The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal @picadorbooks

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The Doll FactoryAbout the Book

London. 1850. The Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and among the crowd watching the spectacle two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist, it is the encounter of a moment – forgotten seconds later, but for Silas, a collector entranced by the strange and beautiful, that meeting marks a new beginning.

When Iris is asked to model for pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly her world begins to expand, to become a place of art and love.

But Silas has only thought of one thing since their meeting, and his obsession is darkening . . .

Format: Hardcover (336 pages)   Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 2nd May 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Doll Factory, the author’s debut novel, is set in Victorian London and provides a vivid picture of life in the period.  Whilst those in the higher echelons of society throng the glittering halls of the Great Exhibition or the Royal Academy, the poor wander ‘narrow and fetid’ passages, dark alleys with ‘green slime on their walls’ and inhabit the crowded rookeries where poverty-stricken young men and women support themselves through petty crime or prostitution. Those lucky enough to find employment, like Iris and her sister Rose, work long hours in thrall to the whims of their employers.

It’s no wonder Iris longs to escape her current occupation painting the faces of dolls and fulfil her artistic potential. When the opportunity comes it seems to her ‘as if her life was charcoal before, and now it takes on the vividness of oil paint’.  However, Iris’s new found freedom comes with consequences and also a degree of trepidation. ‘Her life was a cell before but now the freedom terrifies her. There are times when she longs for the enclosed familiarity of her previous life, because this expansive liberty seems like it will engulf her.’  As it turns out, Iris will soon realise just how precious liberty is.

The Doll Factory is a story of obsession and desire in various forms. Artist Louis Frost, and the other members of the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, have a desire to challenge current artistic conventions. Street urchin Albie wishes to free his sister from a life of prostitution, one in which, obscenely, dying girls are the most treasured by clients. Albie also has rather specific ambitions of his own.  Meanwhile Silas, the owner of a shop filled with curiosities of a rather gruesome nature, harbours an obsession of a more sinister nature. The more the reader learns about his past the more menacing and disturbing his actions become.

There are some melodramatic scenes as events move towards their climax with the book’s ending inviting the reader to reach their own conclusion about the fate of the main characters. Part mystery, part love story, The Doll Factory positively oozes period atmosphere and will appeal to readers who like a good helping of the Gothic in their historical fiction… or those who desire to make the aquaintance of a wombat called Guinevere.

In three words: Atmospheric, chilling, dark

Try something similar: Crimson & Bone by Marina Fiorato

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Elizabeth MacnealAbout the Author

Elizabeth Macneal was born in Edinburgh and now lives in East London. She is a writer and potter and works from a small studio at the bottom of her garden. She read English Literature at Oxford University, before working in the City for several years. In 2017, she completed the Creative Writing MA at UEA in 2017 where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury scholarship. The Doll Factory, Elizabeth’s debut novel, won the Caledonia Noel Award 2018. (Photo/bio: Goodreads)

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#BookReview Violets by Alex Hyde @grantabooks

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VioletsAbout the Book

A young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of the war. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed to the Pacific Front and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together.

In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed and unwanted, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie.

Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women’s courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction.

Format: Hardcover (256 pages)         Publisher: Granta
Publication date: 3rd February 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Find Violets on Goodreads

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My Review

Set towards the end of the Second World War, the book tells the story of two women, both called Violet, with the narrative alternating seamlessly between the experiences of the two women.

The first Violet we meet has just suffered a miscarriage and she and her husband, Fred, find themselves without any prospect of having the child they have longed for, and prepared for.  ‘And the room upstairs, ready and waiting, the walls still bare. No summer baby, she thought. No noise and mess.’ With Fred posted abroad, Violet has to bear her grief alone and try to pick up the pieces of her life.

The second Violet is in the opposite position, pregnant as the result of a brief relationship. Desperate to hide the fact from her mother and fearful of the response to her unmarried state, she signs up for the ATS and is posted abroad. On the voyage to Italy she meets the vibrant and worldly Maggie and they form an unlikely friendship.  Despite Violet going to greater and greater lengths to disguise the fact she is expecting a child, discovery is inevitable.

The way the lives of the two Violets intersect is perhaps not that surprising but still provides a resolution  for both of them, and for Fred, a character I loved.

However, the most remarkable aspect of the book, and the feature which sets it apart from other books I’ve read, are the lyrical passages which interrupt the text from time to time. Addressed to ‘Pram Boy’, the unborn son of Violet, these passages are poetic in nature and contain some striking imagery. They chart the progress of the child Violet is carrying from conception, through gestation, to birth.  Often the passages use metaphors linked to Violet’s experiences at the time, such as this during her voyage to Italy.

So wait then, stay your course
Decked and berthed and set in the hold, darkly stowed
That’s you, mother-lover, filling her up.
Deep in the womb glow, sweet loving cup.

Finally, Pram Boy makes the journey from being ‘a rounded pod of seed’ in his mother’s womb to the outside world.

Come now, hush
A moment’s respite, release,
Before your un-knit skull crowns to the air
To the burn of a ragged tear
And your Mama a cat panting its litter-runt free

Perhaps the only criticism I can make of the book is that the ‘second Violet’s’ story is more eventful and compelling but this is a minor quibble because Violets is a remarkable debut and I think Alex Hyde is an author to look out for in the future.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Granta Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Lyrical, intense, imaginative

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