Category: Publication Date

  Longlisted for 2014 Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize

Five words from the blurb: girl, secret, dark, sinister, lyrical

Reasons She Goes to the Woods is a dark story about a deeply disturbed little girl. She is violent and often escapes to the woods in order to be alone. Some reasons for her behaviour are revealed over the course of the novel, but much is left to the reader’s imagination.

The book has an unusual structure, with every chapter lasting exactly one page. The writing quality was fantastic, but I quickly became frustrated by the rhythm of the book. I found the layout distracting, my mind concentrating on this rather than becoming absorbed by the characters. If you enjoy poetic vignettes then you’ll love this experimental style, but I prefer a more conventional narrative.

No matter what she does, it’s impossible for Pearl to shake off the feeling that there’s a raw, weeping patch growing on her heart, and that someone is pressing on it. It’s not as if I care about stuff, she thinks, but tonight the burning starts the moment she lies down, and chews away until she jerks herself out of bed and runs to open the window.

Some of the scenes were disturbing, but I reached the end of the book without really understanding their purpose. They seemed to exist purely to shock the reader, something I’m not keen on.

The ambiguous nature of the text means that it will probably work well as the focus of a book group discussion, but as an individual reader I felt I gained little more than a few disturbing new images in my head.

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The thoughts of other bloggers:

…disturbing and unputdownable, an uneasy but thought-provoking read.  Annabel’s House of Books

…it was so sick. Book-ish Variety

Original, offbeat, short and bitter-sweet. Amazon Reviewer

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Five words from the blurb: mother, soldier, Afghanistan, courage, love

I received a review copy of this book last summer, but it didn’t make it to the top of my TBR pile as military stories aren’t normally my thing. Luckily I was persuaded to give it a try by David, one of my regular commenters. He hopes it will make the Baileys’ longlist on Friday and, having now read the book, I agree.

Eleven Days isn’t a typical war novel. It’s a subtle investigation into the mindset of a soldier, showing how the presence of danger affects both those on the battle field and their loved ones many miles away. The book begins in May 2011 with Sara discovering that her son Jason has gone missing during a Special Operations Forces mission in Afghanistan. Through a series of flashbacks the reader discovers Jason’s reasons for joining the Navy and what happened to his father, David. It also shows the mixed emotions of a mother desperate to hear the truth about where her son is.

The writing quality was superb – it captivated me and took me on an emotional roller-coaster, without ever becoming sentimental. Tension was built in a subtle way, but this never felt like the main objective of the book. Instead it questioned the way society thinks about its armed forces; showing a spectrum of opinion through clever use of characters caught in their own uncertain turmoil.

Most people might concede the merits of World War I or Korea but be unable to identify the details. And most people, in the abstract, prefer butter to guns, but most mostly prefer not to think about it all. Has it always been that way? Does a public’s opinion rise and fall like a stock on the occasion of new information and new numbers – of dead, of days fighting, of the change in the price of gas? More likely it fluctuates with something more banal and abstract: the length of their attention span.

I loved the way this book avoided graphic images of war and violence. Instead it focused on military training, showing how soldiers adapt to harsh environments before heading out to a war zone. The detailed descriptions of US Navy SEAL training were fascinating to read and it was interesting to learn that mental training is given the same priority as physical fitness.

It also perfectly captured the relationship between a mother and her grownup son, showing the difficulty of letting him learn from his mistakes and the grief of no longer being the person in control of his life.

I’ve read lots of war stories, but Lea Carpenter somehow managed to capture a fresh angle on the subject. I made a mistake in leaving it out of my Baileys’ Fiction Prize longlist prediction last week. It deserves to be on the list and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the judges recognise its brilliance.