Product Description

Young Gwenni Morgan has a gift. She can fly in her sleep. She's also fond of strawberry whip, detective stories and asking difficult questions. When a neighbor mysteriously vanishes, she resolves to uncover the secret of his disappearance and return him to his children. She truthfully records what she sees and hears: but are her deductions correct? What is the real truth? And what will be the consequences - for Gwenni, her family and her community - of finding it out? Gwenni Morgan is an unforgettable creation, and this portrait of life in a small Welsh town on the brink of change in the 1950s is enthralling, moving and utterly real. Mari Strachan's debut is a magical novel that will transport you to another time and place.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6451 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Catherine O'Flynn, author of What Was Lost
I loved this novel.

The Times
A warm and touching, but blessedly unsentimental, novel.

Herald
An assured debut novel, this is a compelling page-turner for all ages.

Customer Reviews

Darkly comic tale of 1950s life, death and eccentricity
The book starts gently, easing the reader into the world of Gwenni Morgan, a young girl who is fascinated by everything and everyone around her. The author, Strachan, introduces a splendidly entertaining cast of misfits and eccentrics, made all the more entertaining because they feel so real. In 1950s Welsh village life, everyone knows everyone's business but no-one ever says a thing.

Gwenni is a wide-eyed, captivated observer of everything that goes on. She describes the people, their clothes, their mannerisms - often in hilarious terms but always in manner consistent with her charming character. Strachan does a splendid job of maintaining Gwenni's voice and personality throughout.

It is this attention to detail that makes the story so beguiling. It quickly gathers pace with a missing man, police enquiries and a murder investigation all careering headlong into a surprising - and yet entirely logical - climax.

This is one of those books you read at one sitting, tea and biscuits at your side and a big 'Do Not Disturb' notice on the door. Superb.

Everyone knows and no-one says
According to Wikipedia, an ingénue is "a girl or a young woman who is endearingly innocent and wholesome". She is generally accompanied, as foil, by a vamp and there is often a romantic subplot featuring a young man just as innocent as the ingénue.

On this template, Mari Strachan has constructed a beautiful story set in a small Welsh village within sight of Snowdon in the late 1950s.

The ingénue is Gwenni Morgan, poised at the very end of childhood, who is bright, imaginative and therefore considered "odd" by her stolid peers, mother and sister. Her Kindred Spirit and Best Friend, Alwenna, is the knowing vamp, who has just discovered boys. Gwenni's `romantic interest' comes towards the end and is hardly that, a merest precursor for what is to come.

It is a truth universally understood that remote rural villages are hotbeds of illicit relationships overlaid with secrets and lies. The death of one of the villagers leads to an investigation and Gwenni is determined to play detective. Her relentless, innocent "childish" questions directly challenge the protective hypocrisy all around. It's scary stuff.

Ms Strachan has a wonderful feel for poverty in the 1950s. Her descriptions of the Morgans' domestic life: bed-sharing, paper thin walls, freezing cold, disgusting food, baths in front of the fire, a relentless lack of privacy, draw one into a life before this one. I am old enough to remember this the first time round and it certainly felt horribly authentic.

The plot is carefully handled, and the book rapidly becomes a real page turner. The intelligence in this book is that even as the reader reaches the end, and has the momentary illusion that all loose ends have been definitively tied up, there comes a realisation that all of what we think we know is in fact ambiguous. We may hope that Gwenni has finally come to a complete understanding, but she does have a habit of putting the best complexion on things.

The first person narrative style and linear development make this a suitable book for the `young adult' as well as adult market. It was also serialised on BBC Radio 4's "A Book at Bedtime". Highly recommended.

Whimsically wishy-washy
I managed to get through a sizeable chunk of this book, Mari Strachan's debut novel, but ultimately found it utterly unreadable and had to admit defeat. This was partly a personal reaction - I don't think I was the right reader for it at all - but I still think that whatever mood I had approached it in I would have found it badly written and unoriginal. The synopsis sounded fairly cliched, with the story centring around a twelve-year-old girl in a small Welsh town who determines to take matters into her own hands after the mysterious disappearance of one of her neighbours, but it can be particularly refreshing when authors deliberately take on a cliché and do it well, so I decided to give the book a go anyway, especially when it came with an endorsement from Catherine O'Flynn, whose `What Was Lost' - also centring around a child detective - I loved.

However, my major problem wasn't with the plot, but with the style of narration. The main character, Gwenni, is nearly thirteen, but sounded closer to eight or nine, and although I see other reviewers have argued that she's meant to sound young for her age, I found this incredibly grating. This is probably where my own personal taste comes in - I really disliked Gwenni, finding her `whimsicality' and `imagination' difficult to take, and I can see that if you felt more of an affinity with the character, the book would probably be an easier read. Nevertheless, the writing style is still clunky and confusing - character after character is dropped in, but never brought to life, so I found myself lost in a sea of names. I also got no sense of the Welsh landscape or the particularities of Gwenni's town at all, despite the use of Welsh dialect.

I admit that I'm probably being particularly hard on this novel because I've seen it done before, and done much better. Susan Fletcher's debut, `Eve Green', also features a young girl in a Welsh setting who investigates a mysterious disappearance, but diverges sharply from this novel because of its completely convincing eight-year-old narrator and marvellous descriptive writing and atmosphere. It also comes dangerously close to cliché and has a few scenes that didn't quite work for me, but is overall a wonderful read. If you liked this book, I'd definitely recommend you try that one as well, and if you disliked this, but were intrigued by the synopsis, it might be a good alternative.