From Publishers Weekly
In this odd and moving second novel from Azzopardi, whose first novel, The Hiding, was a Booker finalist, a thief makes off with a small case containing some useless relics belonging to an elderly homeless woman—variously called Patricia, Lillian and Winifred, depending on the people who "care" for her. Patricia's search for the thief and her belongings becomes an excavation of her past, beginning with her prewar girlhood in the English town of Chapelfield; it's a haunting evocation of neglect, abuse and mental illness. Born with a head of spiky red locks that her dad refers to as "telltale" hair, the "feeble-minded" Patricia is passed off to her grandfather (after her depressed, delusional mother dies), then, during WWII, sent to live with a bitter, lonely aunt on a scraggly farm. But when 15-year-old Patricia gets pregnant, she's shuttled back to Chapelfield, only to discover that all her relatives have disappeared. It's a harrowing, painful story, saved from melodrama by the unsentimental first-person perspective and a challenging, elliptical narrative. The backstory, revolving around the telltale hair, is slow to emerge, but as the pieces of the plot begin to fall into place, the book gains sweep and power, building to an unexpected (and unexpectedly horrifying) climax. The prose has flashes of brilliance—"the rain is a river of silver coins"—and while some readers won't respond to the fatalistic acquiescence of Patricia/Lillian/Winnie, they can't fail to be moved by the sadness that shrouds this largely lost life.
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Azzopardi's canny sense of the link between trauma and mental instability shaped her first novel,
The Hiding Place (2000). In her second, she hones both her craft and her insights to create a darkly mystical tale of loss, betrayal, and disconnection. Her narrator, Winnie, a homeless woman in her seventies, is a compelling yet enigmatic narrator whose memories of her painful past are abruptly reawakened when she is robbed of her precious few possessions. The reader is carried back to her lonely childhood, when she was known as Patsy, then Lillian, and farmed out to unloving relatives in the English countryside after her mother commits suicide and the Nazis begin their bombing blitz. Considered simpleminded, she suffers every sort of deprivation and is at everyone's mercy, including a lustful shoemaker and a Svengali-like couple who transform her into a crowd-thrilling clairvoyant. Azzopardi's prose is spellbinding. Her rendering of a soul unmoored is keenly poignant. The mysterious and involving situations she conjures are fairy-tale-like in their haunting harshness and deep resonance, and her subtle questioning of our notions of identity, family, and the claims of the dead make for a profoundly contemplative read.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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