![]() ![]() ![]() Her mother retreats into a world she can control. Jenny’s best friend, Alicia, is starving herself and recites poetry backwards. There are many moments when I laughed out loud. There are angels that turn up and cats that die and a father who simply has no idea and spends all his time writing a book about butterflies and emerging only when the tea runs out. It’s a dizzying portrait of adolescence, of all the different ways to go mad. ![]() And her grandmother is the opposite in so many ways a Corsican wise-woman plying her trade in Surbiton. Her mother will not talk about her feelings, is a tightly controlled and deeply angry woman. ![]() It’s told by Jenny, who is growing up after her brother’s death. And then again, the book was just full of characters that I recognised – people from my life who had snuck into the pages and were waving out at me. In many ways, it was very much of its time. It’s a story of grief, madness and menstruation a work full of transformations. This is another one of the Women’s Press books that I’ve managed to get my hands on. On the day my brother died, when I was fourteen, a grey, wet, windy day in late August, my grandmother drowned the cat. ![]()
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