I was offered some book to review by UCLAN Publishing, because I'm on their list, so I chose this and another, and I was so excited to receive them! So thank you very much to UCLAN Publishing for gifting me this copy of this book. I was provided with a copy for review purposes but was not otherwise compensated for this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I didn't like this book much at all and I feel really bad about saying that, because I really thought it sounded like my kind of thing. But it just wasn't. It also took me nine days to read it, which was partly because I was away for the weekend with not much time to read, but also because I just couldn't get engrossed in the prose. It is a shame because I wanted to like it!
The book is set in 1982 and is written as the diary of Evie herself, so it comes off a bit like Adrian Mole in parts, which may or may not be intentional. As it is historical fiction I do think it is broadly of the time, but there were a couple of things that were anachronistic which kind of annoyed me. I also think the language skews more modern, but maybe that doesn't matter.
So anyway, Evie is twenty two and she lives in Leeds with her parents, Dad and Lizzie. Her elder brother, Joe, is married to a woman called Val and they have a one year old baby, Tom. The family is Jewish, but not particularly religious, I think. They attend synagogue but it seems like it's more for the gossip that anything else! They live in a community of Jewish people with a lot of women called Susan and Sarah, which I get was a joke, but it was also a bit difficult to keep everyone straight in my head. Evie used to have a thing with a young man called Alex Ishkowitz but they broke things off, and he is now married to one of the Susans.
Evie visits a psychotherapist and is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. It feels like everyone in her life already knew this and has been kind of blaming her for it? I also strongly suspect her dad is autistic too (since that is the term we use these days). So she starts a diary.
Evie's auntie Miriam dies very suddenly one day, and in her will, she leaves Evie nearly all of her quite sizable fortune. There is a distinct feeling that this is a stupid dea and she won't know what to do with it. Evie is trying to be a witch and as part of this she buys a small cottage in a village near Barnsley and moves there. She goes there because of a picture of a mill in that village that her parents have in the house.
Now it must be that this village is close to where I live because it is four miles from Scissett, and I live about eight miles away from Scissett. Scissett is misspelt as Scisset, which I found incredibly annoying, because it's not that hard to google. In fact the book needed a better edit/proof read because there were a few mistakes like this that I picked up. In fact, Edelman is spelt wrongly on the spine of the book!
Anyway Evie moves there in to a tiny somewhat delapidated cottage and makes friends with some of the locals, but she doesn't entirely fit in. She still practises her magick and she is awkward at times. She sometimes have visions but these aren't really explained enough. I just sort of didn't get the point of the book? I liked Evie enough but just couldn't get into the story.
Two out of five. Sorry.
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