The beginning: Ah Sarah Stovell. The way she won my heart in the first place was the way she wrote about time in Mothernight. She begins Night Flower (affiliate links: B&N, Book Depository) by talking about time again:

All I’ve got now is a pile of hours, and hours ain’t what folk think they are. They ain’t certain. Measuring hours ain’t like measuring water or grain, where one pint is one pint and one ounce is one ounce. Hours are slippery. They shrink or grow, depending on who they belong to, and if you’re a body locked up in solitary confinement, then there ain’t no way round the fact that you’ll be getting the long ones.

These words belong to Miriam, a Romany girl now awaiting her execution in Tasmania. The book then jumps back to the time before Miriam was sent to Tasmania. Convicted of theft, she has been sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land to work as a laborer there for seven years. In alternating sections we have another protagonist, Rose, a well-born women turned governess, who also faces a seven-year sentence for theft. Once they reach Tasmania, the two women are both sent to work at a nursery run by a Reverend Sutton and his wife.

The end (highlight the blank spaces for spoilers): I’m curious why Miriam ends up in solitary confinement and why her soul is “for the devil”. It can’t just be because she’s Romany. It turns out she killed Reverend Sutton. And it turns out that Rose is going to (metaphorically) sell Miriam down the river. Well, I am not unduly surprised, I guess, but I did hope that Rose and Miriam were going to become faithful friends for life.

The whole: Night Flower reminds me of nothing so much as Slammerkin by Emma Donohue, another historical novel about the misery of being boxed into one version of what the world thinks you are. Even before she is convicted of theft, Miriam is generally despised for being a gypsy; and afterward, she has no hope at all. Rose tends to be given the benefit of the doubt, as an upper-class Christian woman; but Miriam, a poor Romany girl, is assumed to be fundamentally wicked.

There’s a crucial theme here that Stovell returns to over and over: In this time, in this circumstance, it is far less important what you do than what you are. Miriam and Rose have committed the same crime, but Miriam isn’t Christian, or well-spoken, and she has never been well-off; so Rose is treated better. She gets a cushier job at the Suttons’ nursery, and it’s clear the Suttons trust and like her much more than they do Miriam. Meanwhile, Reverend Sutton is known by everyone to be an awful person. There are rumors that he sells babies, and Miriam can see for herself that he frequents the brothel across the street. But this — the faults that the women know of — doesn’t matter to his position in society.

I’d have liked to see more shades of gray in some of the characters. Once you know Rose’s entire backstory, she comes to appear fairly one-note in retrospect, and the note in question is not my favorite way to portray a female character. Reverend Sutton never displays any redeeming qualities, and while Sutton’s son John undergoes change over the course of the book, you don’t really get to see the conflict that the change causes in him.

Night Flower is currently on a blog tour. The review schedule is below if you’re interested in reading other people’s thoughts on the book.

Yesterday – iheartbooks.wordpress.com

Tomorrow – www.novelkicks.co.uk

11 August – readinginthesunshine.wordpress.com

12 August – shazsbookboudoir.blogspot.com

13 August – www.mamajhearts.co.uk

14 August – dizzycslittlebookblog.blogspot.co.uk

15 August – bookswithbunny.blogspot.co.uk

Note: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The post Review: The Night Flower, Sarah Stovell appeared first on Reading the End.

Mothernight is about a girl called Leila, who was sent away from her family as a little girl, following the death of her half-brother. She has spent her life at a boarding school, rarely going home because her stepmother hates her. Only recently she has fallen in love with a girl called Olivia, and it has been arranged that Leila and Olivia will go to Leila’s home for a visit. Everyone at Leila’s home is tense and awkward, and there is an angry, manipulative, dysfunctional neighbor girl called Rosie, on whom Leila seems strangely dependent. The writing was lovely. As soon as I started the book I liked the way Stovell writes. Here’s the first paragraph:

Along with a few of the things that held them together–a bank statement, a quote for repairing the ivy damage at the side of the house, advance notice of September’s increase in school fees–the letter that was inevitably bound to pull them apart arrived in the morning’s post.

Stovell writes with an economy of style that I admire. I wish she had written six more books. Mothernight is depressing as hell, and by the end of it I started to feel like Stovell was being grim just to be grim, but I would still read six more books by her because I like her writing. Here is what Olivia says about Leila:

She never said Dad. She always said My father, and I thought it sounded so possessive and yet so remote, as though he might have been one of those ravens at the Tower of London–the ones that had had their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly away even though no one knew what they were there for, or what good they did. They only knew they were important, and it would be a disaster if they ever let them go.

The characters in this book are wonderful and vivid, and I loved it that Leila and Olivia’s relationship was hardly a thing at all. They get in trouble at school, a little, and Leila’s stepmother starts out a little sneery of them, but mostly, that it’s a same-sex relationship doesn’t make a huge amount of different. Olivia’s devoted to Leila, and when Leila isn’t having a family-tragedy-downward-spiral, she’s devoted to Olivia too.

Much of your enjoyment of this book will depend on whether you enjoy this type of book. Myself, I like books where there is a family tragedy that nobody wants to talk about, and everyone acts like if they don’t talk about it with sufficient persistence, it will go away; but then, aha, you can’t get rid of something by pretending it didn’t happen, so eventually it All Comes Out. That is one of my favorite types of books. Even better if (not the case here) the book starts out by telling you the ultimate outcome and then you spend the rest of the book finding out why. Saves me having to read the end.

Oh, and also, I appreciate having this pointed out. This does not get pointed out frequently enough:

I wasn’t allowed outside the garden and that, too, was because of strangers. They told us about them at school. The staff were vigilant about it, every year. They never said a word about the ones who weren’t strangers. They never said a word about the people you knew. The ones in your house. Rosie knew, though. Rosie understood statistics.

True story. Thank you, Sarah Stovell. Please write more books. I will read them even if they are grim.

Other reviews:

Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover
My Favorite Books

Also, an interesting but spoilery interview with Sarah Stovell over at Vulpes Libris.

Let me know if I missed your link!

The post Mothernight, Sarah Stovell appeared first on Reading the End.