Emily Woof

Another tricky one to review, because I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Emily Woof is clearly a talented writer who deserves to be better known, and much of this book covers ground that is very familiar to those of us who grew up in 80s Britain. Framed by a conventional love story, the rest of the book covers a lot of ground, part rites of passages story telling the parallel stories of Ursula and Jerry, two children of very different Newcastle backgrounds, whose love story is constantly frustrated by their incompatible expectations and by the sometimes malign influence of Ursula's grandmother "Ganny Mary", whose background in Padiham, a Lancashire milltown overlooked by Pendle Hill (the one famous for its witches) is explored in some detail. Some of the descriptions, particularly of 80s left wing politics are accurate and often funny, and there are some very striking passages, but the whole is a little uneven and I found my attention wavering at times.… (meer)

Ursula grows up in a house of mirrors and though she tries to avoid looking at her reflection, she cannot. So it is apt that she is the chameleon of this story, changing her appearance, her style, her clothing, so that as the years pass she seems a different person.
‘The Lightning Tree’ is the twin story of Ursula and Jerry. She lives in Jesmond, a nicer area of Newcastle, and through her childhood she passes close to Jerry, who grows up in a flat at the rougher Byker Wall. When they do meet, there is a connection. Their lives run in parallel, twisting and turning, sometimes together, other times far apart. It is a love story, and an un-love story. How it is to fall in love as an adolescent and then see that love challenged into maturity, changing priorities, changing values, changing circumstances. Jerry, his nose always in a book, goes to Oxford and seems destined for politics. Ursula, less academic, goes to India where she undergoes something of a ‘Marabar Caves’ experience which is not really explained and which I still didn’t understand at the end of the book.
Interwoven with Ursula and Jerry’s stories is that of Ursula’s Ganny Mary, her rural Lancashire upbringing, and how her life was affected by the death of her father and the change in her mother Annie who had her own ‘Marabar Caves’ experience, up Pendle Hill in Lancashire.
There’s no doubting the energy in this book, but I did find the storyline confusing, there are so many surplus characters who we never really engage with, and Ganny Mary never ages. It is an enigmatic book, but one which I struggled to really grasp. A small aside – I love the cover, but then I do love trees!
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/… (meer)

Emily Woof's first novel depends on her characters to make the story interesting to the reader as there is not much of a plot to follow. Katherine, a former dancer and now a wife and mother, is the daughter of David and May Freeman, neither of whom have paid much attention to their children. David's world is wrapped up in sustaining and enlarging the Broughton Foundation, a place for struggling artists, especially poets, to be supported and encouraged as they struggle to complete their first works. May is determined to separate herself from her roles as a wife and a mother so she can continue to believe she lives the life of an "independent" woman.

David is enamoured with art and artists, and his life is consumed with fund raising, and with his belief in the importance art should assume in each person's life. Unfortunately this does not extend to his interest in his daughter as a dancer, and she spends much of the book in introspection and in reacting against this inability of her father to value her life. She ends up in an affair with one of her father's artists and comes close to ruining her own marriage as well as her lover's marriage. Finally she comes to terms with her worth to herself and her family as her father is dying.

The book is engaging in its portrayal of the art world and the emotional turmoil to a child when their father or mother cannot make themselves emotionally available, but all in all the characters seem so self absorbed as to make them unsympathetic and in the end one did not care that much about their fates.… (meer)