Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Plot takes a back seat to poignant vignettes of country life in this discursive novel from Hildyard (Hunters in the Snow). While in lockdown during Covid, the unnamed narrator remembers her youth in Yorkshire at the end of the 20th century in flowing if disjointed scenes. The daughter of marginally employed academics, she recalls a fierce friendship with an older girl named Clare, the shifting fortunes of the town's quarry, and bucolic scenes of patiently observing nature. Alice, an older neighbor the children call a witch ("with an instinct for victimizing difference") leaves treats for a three-footed deer. The school gets its first computer and a teacher calls attention to ecological threats. Clare, now in a higher grade, becomes a conversational fixation for the children after her cancer diagnosis and another girl's family moves to Australia only to suddenly return. Hildyard evokes her narrator's nostalgia without idealizing the past, presenting the violence of nature and the town's economic struggles through a child's perception. The narrator, who is "still waiting for things to stop beginning," seems to both long for her simpler childhood and recognize the confusing pains and tumult of childhood. It's a gorgeous novel of a youth spent on the cusp of societal upheaval. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Past and present collide in this novel from Hildyard, author of the Somerset Maugham Award--winning Hunters in the Snow. Isolated in lockdown during the early days of the pandemic, a middle-aged woman sits by her window, observing her neighbors and looking back on her childhood. Growing up in rural England close to an abandoned quarry, she was a keen observer of the natural world--from kestrels to frogs, fox cubs, and all manner of insects. The humans in her life received equal scrutiny; her childhood friends, their quirky families, and assorted neighbors all sparked her interest that was ultimately more clinical than emotional. In particular, she was a dispassionate observer of a friendly older neighbor succumbing to dementia and of her close friend, Clare, who fell seriously ill. Now, after a largely unsettled life, the woman is alone at home, studying her houseplants and continuing to view what little she can see through her window. VERDICT The pandemic provides a lens through which Hildyard's narrator assembles a pastiche of memories. This quiet, well-written novel, which has a surprise ending, is worth a look.--Barbara Love
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman weathering quarantine isolation in her urban home reinhabits a childhood spent in the fields and woods of North Yorkshire. This unusual novel of minute, lush observation opens on a spring day in the narrator's distant childhood. Looking down into the quarry at the edge of her small village, the narrator sees a sheet of the clay wall drop away and expose the interior of a vole's burrow to a kestrel floating on an air current high above the quarry's flooded floor. As the narrator follows, the vole flees from its ruined home and out into the open, where it freezes in full view of the now interested kestrel, who tilts in her flight to hover above the creature, ready to drop. The narrator's attention to the two animals--meticulous, alert, and mature--"draw[s] a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building," and she feels "a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him." This small emergency tilts the narrator into a spill of memories that flow from the intimate and particular character of the space and time she has inhabited--the fields, tamed forests, pastures, paddocks, and quiet, seemingly eternal springs of the North Yorkshire countryside. However, as the title suggests, this is not a novel of rugged, wild individualism but rather a pastoral in which the landscape reflects at every turn the imprint of the human world in its management, exploitation, or collaborative reimagining. As an unnamed, but familiar, pandemic rages through the city outside her window, the adult author of these childhood remembrances ponders the interconnectedness of all worlds, from the minute wisps of spiders' webs that break as she passes to the line of ancient hollies planted to mark out a path for winter travelers in the century past to the bundle of wires that dangle exposed on the wall outside her window that form literal lines of connection between all the isolated boxes of her neighbors' own pandemic-stunted lives. The world that is crafted in this novel is like our own world: filled with joys and sorrows, death and renewal, the sublime and the literal filth that turns to soil beneath our feet. Stunning in its intimacy and the precise quality of its recall, the book nevertheless manages to make its primary business the act of inclusion, bringing us into the sense of our separate lives as being "formed and renewed by many minds and mindless forces…the space itself degraded and vanished when these connections failed." A stunning book--a balm for our times--containing the incredible gift of the everyday. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
