Susan Green

In museums, libraries and the landscape, a memory remains of a wilderness of unquiet graves, riddling marshes and storm-beaten cliffs. The stories to come and the commentaries that follow them were inspired by these memories, found in cultural artefacts whose words and images shed light on the idea of the wild in early medieval Britain. I sought to capture flashes of the cruel garnet eyes that wink from the treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and the beautiful, haunting atmosphere of the Old English elegies, Welsh englynion and the Irish immrama. These survivals – whether poetic, artistic, carved from whales’s bone or cast in solid gold – were forged by cultures with a world view very different to our own. My aim has been to evoke and contextualise an ancient imaginative landscape.

In Wild: Tales From Early Medieval Britain, Amy Jeffs leads the reader through stories dating from the turbulent period circa 600 to 1000, through a landscape which seems cold, inhospitable and threatening, among people with not just ‘very different’ but almost incomprehensible lives and beliefs. Invasions, migrations and power struggles convulsed early Britain – depending on where a person lived, it was the Celtic Britons, settlers from various Germanic tribes, clans from across the Irish sea warring with the Picts, and of course, the Vikings… And the weather was really, really bad. An ‘ice-encrusted, storm-swept, eel-infested, midnight-sun-illuminated wilderness’.

I was expecting to read, as well as commentary, accessible translations or re-tellings of ancient texts. Instead, Jeffs has created a series of seven tales, combining elements of these texts. Even more unexpected was how visceral, immediate, vivid they are. The first, The Lament of Hos, begins:

Cold it is, cold and so close that I can feel my neighbours against me, their beards and bones rotting like stacks of winter branches. I hear the voices of elves, goblins and old gods that haunt these unhallowed halls. They whisper that I am friendless: that my old companions are dead, that my love has left me forever, that I must hope without hope until I am no more than an ache in the air.

The narrator is a young wife who has been betrayed by her lover, captured by her lord’s kinsmen, executed and thrown into the ‘unhallowed halls’ of a cave or an ancient burial mound where she lives on as a ghost or spirit. It makes me think of those terrifying scenes among the un-dead in The Lord of the Rings. Probably some of the genuine sense of claustrophobia comes from Jeffs’ research. She’s not just rootling around in libraries among Old English tomes; she goes on a caving expedition herself. Only fifteen minutes, crawling around at night under the Mendip Hills in south-west England, but as someone who’s pretty much cave-, cavern- and tunnel-averse, it was a bit too well observed.

What a weird, unsettling and unusual book this is. I mean that as a recommendation! And original wood engravings by the author are an added bonus.

I started reading The Children of Green Knowe by L M Boston for a Substack read-along (first I’ve ever done; will I do a knit-along next?), and immediately entered another world. It’s like being transported into a beautiful old-fashioned snow globe so as well as following Tolly’s adventures in the book, the story doubles so I see myself wandering alone around the castle-cum-house, going with Mr Boggis into the stables and little by little discovering the garden. I know by heart the carved mouse, the rocking horse, the birdcage. I know the topiary deer, the huge stone St Christopher and the laughter and pattering footsteps of the friendly ghost children. And I sit in front of the fire, leaning against Granny Oldknow’s knees, listening to the first story, Toby’s Story…
Which is where I have to stop if I am going to read along with everyone else. It’s such a special book; its magic has never faded with familiarity and I’m looking forward to being part of a little Green Knowe fan club.

The place where we stopped – Tolly, Granny Oldknow and a family story – echoes a project I’ve just started. My mother left a massive stash of family history research and I’ve really only had a superficial look at it. Until now. A friend has been researching her maternal line, regularly updating me on the discoveries and stories of this chain of fore-mothers. She’s following the mitochondrial DNA. After I had lunch with her recently, the bug has bitten, hard. Another friend – bless her! –  is now transcribing Mum’s handwritten pages and I’ve just subscribed to Ancestry.com.

And I’ve been thinking, too, about my own family stories.  As a small child, I used to ask my parents about when they were little. There was the tale of Dad, sick of being bullied, finding a pair of pliers and using them on his brother’s big fat bum. Mum, walking along the (strictly out-of-bounds) railway line and getting her foot stuck in the track. Luckily for my future existence, the train stopped, the driver got out and released her with a severe scolding. Then there were the stories of their parents. Mum’s father running away to sea and Dad’s father (unbelievably, since he was a grim and crusty old chap) playing in a dance band. Going back into the far past, there were tales of blood feuds and romances among Border Scots from Mum, and religious persecution in Silesia (now part of Poland) from Dad. I only half remember most of them, but Mum, amazingly, made a file called ‘Family Myths and Legends.’ She wrote that she couldn’t vouch for the truth of them, but because they were told and re-told for generations, they make part of her heritage. Part of her.

And therefore part of me. There’s a family surname on my mother’s side that has, for six generations, been carried down as a middle name. I forgot about it for my own son, but I know my cousin’s oldest son has it. I’m hoping that Ancestry will shed some light. Who were these people, where were they from and why did they remain so important to their descendants?

But like Mum, I don’t intend to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a  brain-injured version of writing for adults, as (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It is a platform on which everything else is built. It’s through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what’s round the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.

When I first read a review of Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood in the Guardian’s book pages, I practically drooled (sorry, but you know…book hunger). I knew I would love it. And I did.

In the foreword, Leith lays out his ambitions for the book – in the role of a literary historian, to discuss the books and writers he thinks are important. He does so much more, though; he treats children’s literature seriously. I don’t mean solemnly; Leith doesn’t write as an academic, and the book is wide-ranging, lively and often funny. I loved that he gets just how important books can be to a child, how they can help make your world. And I loved how he digs into the often complex and troubled lives of some of the most influential writers – like JM Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett – to make sense of their work.

The most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who have the most invested in it emotionally. Often, they are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.

If you accept that it deals almost exclusively with British writers (and Leith explains why; he thinks what he calls the British canon has had an outsized influence on the world), it could become a standard text. I could have used it when I was studying for my Graduate Diploma in Children’s Literature. Its great strength – which is that Leith writes about his chosen authors and their work in depth – could also be seen as a weakness, because he’s had to leave out so many (and some of them are my favourites, too*).  But at 578 pages, The Haunted Wood is still a weighty tome. I’m both a reader and a writer of children’s books, so this was a long, luxurious wallow in a subject I love.

*Joan Aiken, for instance. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was one of the pivotal books of my childhood – I nearly wore it out! – and as an adult, it’s informed my writing for children. And then there’s Penelope Lively, William Mayne, Leon Garfield, John Masefield, Dodie Smith, Mary Norton…

One of the gifts of growing older has been birds.

My parents used to sit by the big window in this house, sometimes with binoculars or an old pair of opera glasses, and watch the birds in the garden. I thought it was basically an old-people thing; in particular a thing for old people with limited mobility, like my folks. It was quite charming, the way they’d get excited about the appearance of this or that species.

I didn’t think that one day I would sit by the window, eyes peeled for bird action outside. Now, first thing in the morning, I check to see who is out and about. I’ve placed three birdbaths where we can see them, and scarcely a day goes past without one of us beckoning to the other and pointing at a honey-eater, a silver-eye, a firetail, a wattlebird – or a blue wren.

Blue wrens were much beloved by my elderly neighbour and friend, Margaret. Friends and family gave her a constant stream of blue-wren cards, notepaper, embroidered handkerchiefs and mugs; for some reason I never knew, they were ‘her’ bird. And now they are mine (though I haven’t gone for the blue-wren merch – at this stage, anyway).

I started with just wanting to encourage birds into the garden. There were always plenty passing through- like magpies, bronzewings, parrots and cockatoos – but how to get them to stay? I thought a bird feeding station might be just the thing – a delight – but the sulphur-crested cockies hogged it, made a mess and a racket so we canned that idea. Little birds, I decided. So I planted lots of shrubs and bushes, and over the years they’ve grown into sizeable thickets, and now… I have little birds.

I have blue wrens. My heart’s desire, I tell people. For months I’ve seen them every day; they are nesting snug and hidden from view in my next-door neighbour’s cypress. I think some might even be nesting somewhere in our yard. So far, I have no sense of familiarity. Each time I see one, it’s nothing less than a tiny blue miracle. I still do that involuntary in-drawing of breath, my heart still leaps, I still identify the feeling as joy, or delight. The brilliant blue of the male, the softer brown of the females, their long upright flirty tails and little round bodies, their loud chattering calls and darting flight. All of this a good antidote to the shitty gang of shitty world leaders – madmen, basically – who infest the shitty world at present. Maybe they’re no worse than they ever were, but I’m finding it doesn’t pay to dwell. I’m still avoiding the TV news but somehow I seem to read bits and pieces, and know – for instance –  that Trump has picked an anti-vaxxer to lead the Health Department, and Musk to kill off the public service.

And so this memoir by Frieda Hughes seemed to fit the bill as comfort reading. But it was not the light-hearted, heart-warming animal tale I might have expected. It was the story of an obsession, an overwhelming one, almost an addiction.

Hughes rescues a little magpie nestling found in the aftermath of a storm. She saves its life, and goes on to care for it and love it … and let it live inside, destroying and thieving and shitting all over the place, attacking neighbours and generally being a horrible nuisance. It is a wild bird, but she wants it to be a pet and along with the obsessively detailed and repetitive accounts of her struggles with George’s behaviour, Hughes documents the long breakdown of her marriage. Not my place to comment, I know, but at times I felt sorry for the poor man, ‘The Ex’, with not only a chaotic wild bird practically attached to his wife, but dogs that have INSIDE LITTER TRAYS.

Though she does mention her famous and tragic parents (Sylvia Plath, she says ‘deserted’ her when she committed suicide), it’s not a misery memoir. Or not in that direction. But misery it is. Understandably, Hughes has a life-long quest for ‘home’, for love, for stability and permanence. One of the most poignant episodes from the book was a description of a visit with her father and an Irish friend to a small island. No one lived there, and the animals had no fear. It was like a dream; she was able to put her hands down into rabbit burrows and stroke their fur; she was able to handle the birds that roosted there. A little, underpopulated Eden. When it was time to go home, a storm brewed up and the boat trip away from that perfect place was nightmarishly terrifying. The symbolism made me want to cry for her as I thought about the two-year-old sleeping in her cot, while downstairs in the kitchen her mother was turning the gas oven on.

George: A Magpie Memoir is a strange, sad and also quite fascinating story – but when I read the puffs from other writers I wondered if they’d read the same book. ‘Charming, funny, tender, moving?’ Did it really show that ‘connecting to wildlife has the power to put our troubles into perspective, teach us lessons about life and provide solace for a bruised soul’ (Charlie Corbett)? George was a terror. In Hughes words, ‘a little shit’. There were occasional moments of connection, but as she herself recognises, she was really looking for a creature to rescue, and to love. Wild animals need to be wild, and eventually she had to let George go. She’s gone on to rescue more birds, mainly owls.  No doubt with the same patience, tenderness and huge amounts of disinfectant.

Sometimes even murder stories or favourite children’s books don’t do the trick, and such a time is now. I have been avoiding any news about the US elections (or the war in the Middle East – and poor Ukrainians, they’re still suffering, too) but I can’t help feel the shadow of it. My feeling, in common with a lot of other people, is that Americans are stuffed if Trump wins, and stuffed if he doesn’t. Though ‘stuffed’ depends on your viewpoint, of course. And looking backwards, it’s just what’s always happened. Good and evil, an eternal struggle? The angels and the devils of human nature? As a post-war baby, a baby-boomer if you like, I grew up in a country and a world that seemed on a path of becoming fairer, more peaceful, less violently prejudiced. In a word, better. Ha! My old neighbour Margaret, who died a couple of years ago at 98, would be shaking her head right now. She saw a re-run of the 1930’s unfolding around her, and could scarcely believe that it was all happening again, re-jigged with a new cast of villains (Putin, Trump and the rest) for the 2020’s.

But back to the consolation of books. Books with pictures. Books of pictures! The Anglophile in me turned away in disgust for many years, and quite righteously, as I learned more and more about just how bloody awful the English were to everyone else on their many colonial adventures. However I realise that I can still love a certain kind of Englishness. And this lovely book, Wild Light: A Printmaker’s Day and Night is just SO English, harking back to the woodcuts of Thomas Bewick, an accompaniment to the poetry of John Clare and William Blake, a peek into a fantasy world of  bucolic perfection.

I haven’t gone so far as to make any actual prints yet, but I’ve been inspired to buy some lino (not the old-fashioned kind which was hell to carve, especially if it was cold; you had to put in front of a heater to warm up, and I usually ended up with a wound or two from the tools) and get out my sketchpad. I learned how to do linocuts when I did printmaking as part of my Diploma of Teaching, and over the years I’ve had phases of doing a run of them. Making linocuts is the ultimate in DIY printmaking, I think. You don’t need a lot of space, you don’t have to use chemicals or oil-based inks and most importantly, you don’t need a press. It can really be a kitchen table thing.

Harding was born in 1960, and studied art at Leicester Polytechnic and then Nottingham Trent University. She’s a prolific artist and illustrator; her kind of nostalgic ‘British countryside’ vision is having quite a moment, which is a bit ironic given that the British countryside is in deep, deep shit with so many species – like hedgehogs! –  endangered. A bit like here, eh? She recently illustrated a children’s version of Isabella Tree’s book, Wilding, about the experiment at Knepp Castle. And many people would be aware of her covers for Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, The Wild Silence and Landlines. I was toying with the idea of buying one of her calendars for 2025 – but maybe every day is a little too much of the Englishness.

I’m going through a very frustrating phase in my reading life. It’s very unsettling; I can’t seem to find the ‘Goldilocks’ book, the one that’s just right. My library bag is full of returns that I’ve glanced into and skimmed and rejected. I always have a book on the go, and often two or three, so is this a sign that I really should be doing something else? But what? There’s nothing like a sinking into a good book. I just have to find the right one. Or persevere with the ones I’ve started.

Well, I’m making myself trudge through a ‘creative memoir’ at present, and the more I persevere, the pickier I get. The prose seems clumsier, the structure clunkier, the whole thing obvious and trite and unbearably serious with every page. It was well-reviewed and highly recommended by a writer I particularly like (I even subscribe, for ACTUAL MONEY, to her Substack) so wanted to read it. And I waited for ages for my reserve to make it to #1 in the library queue. Sigh. But I don’t like to write about books I don’t enjoy, so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll tell you about Death at the Sign of the Rook. It was the last novel I truly devoured; a new Jackson Brodie novel. I was a tiny bit book-shy, because the last one I read was quite shattering (from memory, child sexual abuse by highly connected Tories, or was it media types?).
There was no need to worry, and I should have known from the title. This is Atkinson having loads of fun with the genre.

Brodie is slowing down, and so is business. He’s hired by an elderly brother and sister to find a Renaissance portrait that’s gone missing from their mother’s house. Has the care worker stolen it? It just so happens that a Turner has disappeared from a nearby stately home, in similar circumstances. The coincidence is too much for Brodie, so he reaches out to Reggie Chase (who featured in When Will There Be Good News?) who’s on the case. The novel then takes a turn into classic golden era British crime with a snowstorm, an axe murderer, a mute vicar, a one-legged Major and a cast of nasty aristocrats and tourists at a farcical Murder Mystery weekend. Actually, the whole thing descends into farce. I laughed out loud. Which is alarming, when you consider that people were getting violently killed and maimed.

It was clever and funny and, in the desert of reading matter I have stumbled into, a delightful drink of sherry in the library. On a silver tray. With little cheese biscuits.
I’ve read better mysteries, but with much less enjoyment.

Second time around for The Weekend; I first read it when it was released in 2019. I hated it.

Because I loved Adele, Jude, Wendy and Finn the dog as if they were real people – my friends –  and Charlotte Wood was being mean to them by exposing their ageing bodies and their many frailties to the world. It was, I thought, a very cruel book.
(Silly, yes, I know, since Charlotte Wood invented Adele, Jude, Wendy and the poor, old, befuddled and dying Finn but it shows how passionately engaged I was and, though I didn’t realise this at the time, what a good writer Wood is).

The Weekend was this month’s book group novel and – guess what? – this time I loved it.  No reservations, I really did. What a turnaround. A pity, therefore, that out of nine members, only two of us did. One thoughtfully appreciated it. The rest thought it was boring, frustrating, pointless or just not their cup of tea. Which just shows, once again, the variety of responses a group of keen and intelligent readers will bring to the same book.

The story, or rather the set-up, is simple. A group of old friends meet at a beach house somewhere on the NSW coast. They’re in their 70’s. Elegant Jude, once a successful restauranteur, long term mistress of a wealthy married man. A control freak. Wendy, a famous writer and academic and owner of Finn. Widowed. Scattered, exasperating, brilliantly original. And Adele, once famous as well, an actress now unable to find work. Her lover has just kicked her out, she’s on the pension and fears poverty and homelessness. But she’s still a dramatic, passionate, sensual presence. Their friend, Sylvie, owner of the beach house, was the linch-pin of the group. Now she’s gone and they are clearing out the place where they gathered so many times in the past.

The activities of the weekend – inspecting, sorting and disposing of the house contents, cleaning, preparing food, eating out, inviting theatrical acquaintances for drinks, going to the beach – provide the canvas for a rich exploration of their long friendship, the trajectories their lives have taken, the choices and the consequences. The challenges of ageing are front and centre, yes, but this time I am 5 years older and what I thought of as cruelty now seems like clear-eyed observation and even a kind of compassion. The women are flawed, yes. They’ve got old bodies and (almost) full biographies, but they’ve got some miles in them yet. They may still surprise themselves.

I also loved Wood’s most recent book, Stone Yard Devotional, and I have my fingers crossed for her success in the Booker Prize.

All around me now there are open acres, acres of ruined and desolate land, where the bombs fell. Over there the square tower of a gutted church survives as the only landmark, till the harmonious walls of the cathedral rise exposed in the background. It’s quiet here, and beautiful, for into this wilderness the wild things have returned. Grass grows here, covering, healing, and russet sorrel in tall spikes, and goldenrod, swaying beside broken walls, full of butterflies, and purple loose-strife, and one plant, willow herb, that some people call fireweed, grows wild in this stony place as plentifully as grass, though it used to be rare enough to be searched out, and collected. It is a strange plant; it has its own rugged sort of loveliness, and it grows only on the scars of ruin and flame.
I suppose they will build on this again, some day: but I like it best like this; grown over; healed.

I found Fireweed at the Op Shop a while ago, but spurred on by Kate Constable’s recommendation, I finished it in a rush this week. I had to rush, or I would have stalled. It’s a vivid, harrowing story set during the Blitz in London; two teenage runaways face death and destruction and daily life in wartime. Almost too poignant. I kept thinking about young people in Ukraine, or in Russia for that matter. In Gaza and Israel and Lebanon. Anywhere bombs are falling and the life they might have had is swept irrevocably away in smoke and dust, turned to rubble. I nearly stopped reading many times, asking myself, Do I really need to read something so sad?

But I ploughed on. It was the detail the hooked me, the feel of the place and time. Though the author was only 3 at the time of the Blitz, most of the adults around her as she grew up had experienced life in wartime and so she was able to draw upon their memories and  no doubt that’s what makes it feel so authentic and startlingly realistic.

The narrator is 15-year old Bill, who has run away from the Welsh farm where he was evacuated to safety. He returns to London to wait for his soldier father where he encounters another fugitive, the naive and sheltered Julie. A bond develops, as if they’re family, or even something closer; they become a pair, sheltering in the Underground during night raids, earning money working at the market during the day, drifting around the city together. However it can’t last…

No spoilers, but the ending is not what I predicted. Perhaps it’s even more tragic (is that a spoiler?). I have Goldengrove on the shelf; when I’ve recovered from this book I’ll read it. It might take a while.

There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.

I got a lot of joy out of Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life by Sharon Blackie. So much to like. Fairy tales and folk tales of the British Isles. Myths and Jungian archetypes, psychology and magic. Gorgeous descriptions of the natural world. Just enough of the personal to make sense of the writer’s energy and courage, but not so much that it was all about her (though I am keen to get hold of her other, more autobiographical book If Women Rose Rooted). Inspiring images of elder-women as wise, passionate, nurturing, angry, fierce and/or bloody scary. Now that I am properly old, I feel an inner hag looking out through my eyes more and more often. Makes me wonder what are the possibilities for my remaining twenty-odd years.

I felt uneasy.
I lay in bed watching the wooden doll watching me.
I knew that she was just a doll, of course. She was only three or four inches high, rounded, like a small milk bottle, with her chubby arms…or what was left of them…gathered across her chest. She had weathered badly. All the sharp bits of her, like her ears and nose, were worn almost smooth, and there was a bad crack across her back, but she was still a doll.
The thing is, she kept looking at me…
I touched her, ran my finger down the stump of her nose, and then I had one of the worst shocks of my whole life.
When I drew my finger back from her face, it was damp.
The wooden doll had been crying.

Whenever I’m in the Op Shop and see British junior fiction with a slightly supernatural bent, I snap it up. Emer’s Ghost (1981) is my latest find. It’s a tight (as in short, with only 137 well-spaced, larger print pages) but wholly satisfying book. Emer finds a little doll buried in a ditch, and begins to see a ghostly child, a little ragged girl. What does she want Emer to do? Against the background of school, family life and the minor dramas of a small Northern Irish village, Emer and her sister Breige solve the mystery.
I was impressed with the way the author weaves Irish religion, politics and history into a children’s novel in such a compelling and (a phrase I don’t like, but it works here) age-appropriate way. In the story, Emer’s village houses the ruins of a church burned to the ground by Cromwell’s soldiers; this is based on the real-life Massacre of Drogheda in 1649, where St Peter’s church was deliberately set alight, killing all those inside. On the more cheery side of things, Emer and her siblings, their tired and overworked mother, the nuns, the local eccentric, the egg-smuggling shopkeeper and other local characters are believable and fresh, and the historical tragedy does not weight the story towards gloom and nightmares.

Reading is such a pleasure when you’re in the hands of a good writer!

About the author: Martin Waddell has written over a hundred children’s books. And he’s winner of the Hans Christian Andersen medal. I must have personally sold hundreds of copies of Owl Babies over the years I worked as a bookseller. But I didn’t know that he is also Catherine Sefton! I’ll be looking out for more.

Our most recent library book group novel.

I went along to the meeting quite unsure about Lola in the Mirror. I said to the group, ‘I don’t know what to think about this one. Maybe you can tell me.’
I still really don’t know what I think, but the group members were – for a change – almost all positive.

It’s sort of ‘modern-day Dickens in Brisbane’. The heroine-narrator, a spirited, intelligent young girl, is part of an underworld community that lives in abandoned vehicles in an old car yard. A lifetime on the run with her mother, and our heroine doesn’t know her real name, her true identity. That’s to keep her safe, Mum says. The story is, that she killed the girl’s father, her husband, before he could kill her. And then she ran, and kept running.

The narrator  and her mother struggle, scavenge, work cash in hand for a dodgy fishmonger. She attends a local homeless centre.  They make a life. Then, in a twist of fate, our nameless heroine is abruptly orphaned when her mother saves a child from drowning. Adrift in a brutal world, she consoles herself with her art (her dream is that one day she will have an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art) and her friendships with other homeless people. But she’s got to support herself somehow. So she turns to the sinister fishmonger, Lady Flo.

I’ll stop there, because I don’t know how to go on without spoilers. There’s violence, coincidence, dark and darker secrets with attendant revelations, true love, tragedy, art, kindness and cruelty to power the plot along. The group thought that the writer gave homeless people dignity, treated them with respect and care. Compassion. Even love. That it showed a side of life we tend to turn away from but need to see. That it dealt with important themes of family violence, maternal love, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness.

Mmm. It was a very spirited discussion. But I can’t say I was convinced. I found something slightly off about the book. It was sentimental and about as subtle as a brick, but that doesn’t usually mean I can’t like something. And it’s not as if Dalton was giving his bougie readers a titillating tour of down-and-out existence; from what I’ve read, he’s a sincere person. And I did enjoy his non-fiction Love Stories very much. Lola just seemed…superficial, somehow.
But it could be that my extreme dislike of the illustrations placed throughout the book coloured the whole thing. Which must mean I am… superficial.