The Water's Daughter, by Michelle Lovric: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Michelle Lovric writes fiction for adults and children: a common theme of all her novels is a Venetian setting, and it's very clear from a reading of any of her books that she knows Venice very well, and loves it very much - I think it could certainly be argued that Venice is absolutely at the heart of her writing. She also writes non-fiction; most recently she collaborated with Gemma Dowler on a book about her mudered sister, Millie Dowling, which topped the Amazon and Times bestseller charts. She's also compiled numerous anthologies.

(Image taken from Michelle Lovic's website.)

This book, which is for children, follows on from several others set in the past, and in a parallel Venice . Geographically it's remarkably similar to the city we know today, but it also features a whole troupe of magical creatures. I was particularly delighted to meet the mermaids again: charming, beautiful, but very down-to-earth (!) creatures who live underneath the city and are distinctly foul-mouthed, owing to the fact that they learned their language from pirates. But new to this book is a whole palazzo full of magical creatures who have been transported (by mistake) from Arabia - including a beautiful and utterly amoral djinniya, who has great powers - which, fortunately for Venice, she is not very competent at handling. 

Its human heroine is 12 year old Aurelia Bon, the child of appalling parents who at the beginning of the book are planning to force her to marry the unpleasant son of an unpleasant family; her only other option is to be immured in a nunnery. Aurelia is not the kind of girl to put up with this sort of treatment - she has an extraordinary gift (when she touches a building, her fingers sense its history) and with this, and with a naturally strong personality, comes a firm sense of her own importance. She runs away, and encounters all sorts of dangers but also all manner of wonders. 

She has to battle against all sorts of enemies: a jealous historian who envies her ability to pull the crowds, and has designs on her magical fingers; her ghastly suitor and his family; the very creepy priest in charge of the nunnery; a bunch of pirates (who have lots of saving graces); a group of venal politicians/businessmen whose aim is to such Venice dry of her wealth; and the djinniya. The tussle between the latter and Aurelia is positively epic: they're both powerful, both very selfish, and both actually rather likeable - more so as the book goes on and they have to face up to some uncomfortable truths about themselves.

The book is a glorious flight of imagination, with excitement, humour and glamour in shed loads. I would put it at the upper end of middle-grade - particularly near the beginning, there are some quite scary bits, which might be a bit challenging for younger children - but for the right reader, it offers a gorgeously rich reading experience. And there are the other Venetian children's novels to move on to - it's not essential to read them in sequence. So much to enjoy!

Sue Purkiss's latest book is Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley.

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The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, by Michelle Lovric: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

To begin with, an important note: this is definitely not a children's book!- though Michelle Lovric has written several books for children, at least one of which I've reviewed

on this site. If you've read any of those - a series set in an enchanting alternative Venice, beginning with The Undrowned Child - you will immediately recognise Michelle's very distinctive voice. She rejoices in all the playful possibilities of language - but the lovely words do not hide a sharp wit. Here's an example: 

Mr Rainfleury, in contrast, was in seven separate raptures about his creations. He could not be stopped from fondling their hair, and waltzing them along the top of the mantelpiece... He paid not the slightest attention to our complaints. I flinched at the steel that lined his emollient manners.

The book concerns the seven Swiney sisters from an Irish village, Harristown. Though they don't have enough to eat and live in extreme poverty, they share one extraordinary feature; all of them have hair  which grows so abundantly that, when released, it reaches the ground. Manticory, the red-haired narrator, is one day almost raped by a stranger who has a fetish about long hair. The oldest of the sisters, Darcy - dark-haired, and a very nasty piece of work - sees a way to turn this fetish to the sisters' advantage; she devises a show, in which the sisters sing and dance, and at the end, turn their backs to the audience and let down their hair.

This is the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose models always rejoiced in a positive cloud of  hair, and as Michelle explains in her notes, there was a sort of brotherhood of hair-worshippers. So the show goes down a storm, eventually attracting the attention of two entrepreneurs, Rainfleury and Tristan, who offer to manage the girls. What follows is a recognisable arc in these days of reality shows and celebrity worship; the girls make masses of money but see little of it themselves (except for Darcy) and have no idea how to manage it. So their rise is precipitous, but so is their fall.

The Seven Sutherland Sisters

It's a big novel in every way, with a large cast of eccentric and highly individual characters, who rejoice in a larger-than-life grasp of language and have in particular a tremendous talent for insults - the exchanges between Darcy and her arch-enemy, the Eilleen O'Reilly, are razor-sharp and full of energy. There's more than a touch of Victorian melodrama, but it's spiced with humour and wit and with a very modern take on the cult of the celebrity and the exploitation of the vulnerable. Almost unbelievably, it's based on a similar set of sisters, the Sutherlands, who were American and had a similar - though not quite as extreme - career path.

I guess you might put it in vaguely the same area as some of Joanne Harris's books, but really, I can't think of anything else like it. A rich and witty read.

(My thanks to the publishers, Bloomsbury, for sending me a copy of this book.)

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The Fate in the Box, by Michelle Lovric: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The D’Agos’ house was surrounded by the homes and workshops of Venice’s cloth-dyers, whose sheets of crimson, emerald and saffron-coloured fabric hung like glorious mediaeval pennants from the rooftops and windows. Although the sun had barely risen, it was warm in the workroom. The pungent smells from the dyers’ vats were stealing through the air, along with the sleepy voices of the girl orphans warbling their morning hymns at the grand almshouse of the Mendicanti.

This is a fairly random extract from Michelle Lovric’s new children’s book, The Fate in the Box; I could choose a couple of sentences from almost anywhere, and in the same way, they would reflect the delight in a place (Venice) and the delight in language which are hallmarks of Michelle’s work. You can see, so clearly, the vivid colours of the lengths of fabric; you can feel the warmth in the workroom, smell the dyes, hear the voices of the orphans – and just in that passing reference, you are given a sense of the kind of life those girls are leading, in the strict regime of the cloister. In just the same way as this short extract, the book is full of rich detail and exuberantly imagined places and people. It’s not just the circumstantial detail either; the characters are all utterly individual, each with their own, very special voice, and the story twists and leaps and dives like one of the mermaids who helps to protect the city.

Michelle has already written three other book for children set in this alternative Venice. She’s going backward in time: this one precedes the other three. Some of the characters are familiar – those mermaids, for instance, beautiful and graceful but also greedy and earthy, with a ripe turn of phrase learned from pirates. Some of the family names are recognisable from earlier books too, and so is the general set-up: Venice is in thrall to a selfish and brutal dictator, in this case Fogfinger, and only a small group of children – with the help of cats and various other creatures – can defeat him and save the city.

The Fate in the Box is not for the faint-hearted; in the very first chapter, it seems that Amneris is to be sacrificed at the whim of Fogfinger; she is forced to climb a tall tower, where the Fate in the Box will decide whether she will walk back down again or whether the trapdoor beneath her feet will open, catapulting her into the deep lagoon hundreds of feet below where a terrible sea monster is said to lurk. There are far more edge-of-the-seat moments to follow. But the way the story is told is so affirmative that, even as you seriously consider taking shelter behind the sofa, you know that ultimately good – and the children – will triumph.

I’d recommend this to boys and girls who enjoy adventure, humour, fantasy, and a good story phenomenally well told. It's published by Orion.

Incidentally, over on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, Michelle has written a post about the window displays she has put together about The Fate in the Box - it's here, and it's fascinating.

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The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric: review by Gillian Philip

Please note that this review is of an adult novel.

~

'Do I wish to go on a long walk in the dark with this person?'

It's the question Minguillo Fasan suggests we ask ourselves as he begins his tale of torture, murder and human skin, so the Dearly Beloved Reader can't say she hasn't been warned. But Minguillo, the mad and bad son of a wealthy Venetian businessman, clearly assumes we will be enchanted by his company, even if it's against our better judgement. I know I was.

The core of this darkly fascinating book is Minguillo's undying hatred for the sister - Marcella - who is the rightful heir to his father's house and fortune. That's a problem he resolves fairly quickly, but Minguillo's enmity is not satisfied by cheating Marcella out of her inheritance, and he is intent on spending his life destroying her.

If Minguillo's evils had been solely related by other characters, his relentless malevolence might have been tiresome, but he tells us of his deeds himself, assuming the Adorable Reader's complicity. And he is very funny, as well as vile.

Luckily for our sympathies (and probably our immortal souls), he is not the only narrator: there are four others - Marcella herself; the semi-literate family retainer Gianni; the saintly and skin-obsessed Doctor Santo Aldobrandini; and a nun who is raving mad and homicidal to boot.

Skipping first-person points of view is notoriously hard to do without confusing the reader, but Michelle Lovric pulls it off brilliantly - I never once had to check back because I doubted whose words I was reading. The five voices are very distinct, and distinguished by fairly unobtrusive changing typefaces; their wildly varying stories weave together neatly for the ending.

Now, I've a terrible habit of quietly rooting for the bad guy - especially when the heroine is as saintly and luminous as Marcella. Yes, she's too good - her chief quality is resilience, which is not entirely to her advantage, and occasionally made me want to kick her. So this is where my admiration for the book really sparked: I did not once want Minguillo to triumph. He and the insane religious zealot Sor Loreta are much the most entertaining of the narrators, but that never tipped over, for me, into liking or sympathising with them. Maybe that's partly because they are (one each) responsible for the horrible deaths of my two favourite characters. (One of these deaths made me yell out loud, because I'd been nursing a faint hope of xxx making it back into a future book.)

The Book of Human Skin is not for the Squeamish Reader, as Minguillo frequently reminds us - but he does have a last barb to fling at us before he goes: 'You loved to be shocked, and you craved more.'

Maybe he's right, because I certainly couldn't put the book down. Or only in the very dark hours, when I'd begin to have horrible thoughts about its cover.

The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric

www.gillianphilip.com

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