Lacey's House - Joanne Graham

'I wanted to walk right out of my life and leave it behind.'

Sometimes one way I can see how much I loved a book is by how many sentences or paragraphs I tab with little sticky notes to come back to and think about again once I've finished. There were a lot of places I marked in this book. There were parts of the prose that resonated with me, that moved me, and parts where the use of language particularly appealed to me. In summary, I thought this was a very special book. 

Rachel Moore has suffered a sad loss and moves from Birmingham to the countryside, to get away and start afresh. She is a solitary soul, having grown up in care, though having a brief period with some loving foster parents. She meets Lacey Carmichael, the older lady living next door. Lacey is another isolated soul, teased by the local children, labeled as the mad woman down the road, she is misunderstood and lonely. Then she is accused of a terrible crime.

A connection forms between them, and they begin to trust each other, and to share painful things with each other that they have never told anyone else. They've both experienced such sadness and from sharing their secrets a friendship blossoms despite the difference in their ages. The development of this friendship between Rachel and Lacey over the course of the book is wonderful and fascinating to observe. As time passes, Rachel thinks about how she feels about Lacey: 'I found that I cared for her very deeply, that her vulnerability had somehow pulled me closer and I carried her words, her story, like a heavy cloak about my shoulders.' Rachel attempts to express the pain and sorrow in Lacey's past through her artwork. 

'Her memories came home with me. Walking straight into my studio, I mixed them with acrylics; different shades of blue and deep, swirling turquoise that I threw at the huge canvas as I painted her sorrow, a raging, tumultuous thing that, when I was finished, left me breathless and empty.'

The chapters alternate between the two of them, Rachel's in the first person and Lacey's in the third, and the story progressed and worked really well written in this way.

Rachel likes and trusts Lacey, but doesn't yet know the whole truth; she, and the reader, are kept in suspense. Rachel fears that in the future she too might experience the depths of isolation that Lacey has;

'In fifty years time would it be me standing where Lacey was, with the past eating into me from the inside? I recoiled from the idea of experiencing for myself the stark loneliness that had been so apparent in Lacey's eyes.'

Joanne Graham writes with immense insight, empathy, warmth and poignancy about these women's lives and pasts, and writes sensitively and honestly about themes of mental health, loneliness and loss of a child, about damaging things that happen in people's lives which they are scarred by and understandably spend much time and energy grappling with. I felt emotional as I read, I was angry at the cruelty in Lacey's past, at what people could get away with. So much of a person's past can be hidden away, unknown, unvoiced. I empathised with and liked both Rachel and Lacey, and they both felt very real to me as I was reading. As Lacey thinks to herself, 'How sad for them both that they had to grow up without loving families.' As well as creating engaging, rounded characters, the author tells a powerful story. 

For me, Lacey's House is a wonderful, incredibly moving and very special story of female friendship across generations. It has stayed in my mind since reading it and it made me think. Beautifully, sensitively written, perceptive and touching, I think it was a very worthy recipient of the Luke Bitmead Bursary, a superb debut novel and I'd say it's one of my reading highlights of the year so far.


Thank you to the publisher for kindly sending me a copy of this novel for an honest review. 

Author links - twitter @YarrowH | website

Published by Legend Press

Book Beginnings: Lacey's House by Joanne Graham

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays - The idea is 'to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.' Hash tag #BookBeginnings for twitter and a master linky list on the host's blog.

I'm reading Lacey's House by Joanne Graham, published by Legend Press.


Here's the beginning...

She hadn't spoken to her father in years. The silence had expanded to fill every room in the house until it was a tangible, solid thing that they had to push past whenever they moved. A plate of food would be placed in front of him as he sat at the dinner table, his laundry gathered unrequested, his boots tidied away into the hallway, his medical bag prepared. But not once did she open her mouth to speak, not once did she so much as look at him. 

~~~~~

Have you read this novel? What did you think of it? Do you like the beginning?

Have a great weekend whatever you are reading!

~~~~~

About the book...

Lacey Carmichael leads a solitary life. To her neighbours she is the mad old woman who lives at the end of the lane, crazy but harmless.

Until she is arrested on suspicion of murder.

When Rachel Moore arrives in the village, escaping her own demons, the two women form an unlikely bond. Unravelling in each other tales of loss and heartache, they become friends. Rachel sees beyond the rumours, believing in her innocence, but as details of Lacey's life are revealed, Rachel is left questioning where the truth really lies.

A Humble Companion - Laurie Graham

Laurie Graham is one of those authors who has never let me down; while not deep and weighty, her books are none the less memorable for their lightness of touch, dryness of wit and their memorably entertaining characters. Her latest, A Humble Companion (published in June this year), is rather different from any of her previous books in that it is a historical novel, set in the England of King George III, although she uses the same technique employed to such great effect in Gone with the Windsors and The Importance of Being Kennedy, setting fictional characters and a fictional plot in the context of real life events and people.

The book's protagonist, Nellie Welche, is the daughter of the Prince of Wales's ice cream maker. At the age of 13 she is recruited to be "humble companion" to Princess Sophia - or Sofy as she becomes known to Nellie - the twelfth of King George's fifteen children: "My position in Sofy's life was an unusual one, the result of a royal experiment: a radical notion dreamed up by the most unradical of kings, old George, that his daughter should have a playfellow, a humble companion plucked from the ranks of ordinary people so that she might have a better understanding of the world."

For the rest of her days, Nellie's life is intertwined to a greater or lesser extent with that of Sofy and the other "Royalties", as Nellie calls them.  The chronicle of Nellie's long fictional life is played out against the dramatic national events of George III's reign, and the personal dramas of his rather grotesque offspring.  Thus Nellie witnesses the effects on the "Royalties" of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, but also the effects of King George's increasing madness; of the licentiousness of the court and the sometimes bizarre sexual appetites of his various offspring, including Sofy's bearing of an illegitimate child; and of the King and Queen's increasing despair later in life at the apparent inability of any of their many children to produce a legitimate heir to the throne, culminating ultimately one year before the death of the King, in the birth of Alexandrina Victoria, only child of George III's fourth son, who later became Queen Victoria.  

Against this backdrop of historical events, Nellie's parallel fictional life has its own joys and tragedies, but throughout she maintains a healthy sense of perspective and accepts whatever life throws at her, whether good or bad, commenting on the events of her own life with the same dry wit and wryness that she directs at the national dramas and courtly shenanigans.  Ultimately the triumph of the novel is the character of Nellie herself, a wonderfully likeable, lively and entertaining narrator, summed up by her granddaughter as  "forebearing, impatient, retiring, outspoken, a cruel mimic, a kind friend, tough as an almond shell, and soft-hearted enough to give you the cloak off her shoulders." By the end this is exactly how the reader feels about her too.  Some of the other minor characters also do much to add colour to the narrative, especially Morphew, the Welches' marvellously plain-speaking manservant - "trusty coachman, begrudging footman, kitchen-table revolutionary... a kindly, sentimental man and a sniffing, scratching snub to my mother's genteel ambitions."  As ever with Laurie Graham's books, the primary interest is in the characters and Nellie and Morphew must be among her most memorable creations.  

If I have one small criticism of A Humble Companion, it is that it's not as laugh-out-loud funny as many of Graham's previous books - though it does have its moments!  In part I think this is because many of the "Royalties" are fairly shadowy figures in the book and, because they are quite grotesque, they are more caricatures than characters - although Googling the historical facts of George III's family suggests that this may not have been too far from the truth!  Partly too, I feel the history weighs slightly more heavily on this book than it did on Gone with the Windsors or The Importance of Being Kennedy: in many ways this was a dark and turbulent period and one of the clear conclusions you can draw from it is that life in the second half of the eighteenth century wasn't easy if you were female or royal.  On the flipside, because Graham skilfully weaves her fiction into a solid factual framework, I learned quite a lot of interesting detail, much of it surprising, about the Hanoverian royal family from this book and I did find myself scurrying off to the internet on several occasions to find out more.  In fact, ultimately, A Humble Companion is the sort of book I enjoy most - one that sheds new light on something and educates me, while thoroughly entertaining me at the same time. In other words, this is for me yet another winner from Laurie Graham and I shall again be watching out keenly for her next book.

Published by Quercus

Reviewed by Penny Tattersall - guest reviewer

A huge thank you to Penny for reviewing this novel for The Little Reader Library. Penny is a self-confessed 'chain-reader' who reads a variety of fiction and non-fiction and whose opinion I value greatly when choosing books. I met Penny via the Read It Swap It website. I am very much looking forward to reading this title myself now too. Lindsay. 

You can follow Laurie Graham on twitter @LaurieGraham47 and visit her website here.

Thank you very much to Bethan at Quercus for very kindly sending a copy of this novel.