Reviews and Comments

The collection is absolutely thrilling--boundless and strange. The sentences radiate creative power. Funny and angry. This kind of thing would never be published today. They are 'doing it wrong.' They would need to be tamed, sanded down--in them I see an antidote to the commercialisation of imagination and a way forward.

I read this 30 years ago as a younger woman and as a coming of age story I saw in it a kind of terrible mirror. In the parlance of our times 'I felt seen'. This book is a vortex swirling around a single moment: a girl gets into a strangers car. Everything leading up to that moment and coming after circles it in the narrative, switching point of view from first to third and back. The subject is an object and back to a subject. Rereading this book I now see that it's a document of colonialism and patriarchy and the relationship between the two. A formative text for me, and a master work of autofiction.

What begins as a book about an idyllic cottage garden quickly deepens into a complex narrative about healing the ancestral trauma of slavery and ongoing institutional racism while surviving a pandemic. I particularly appreciated Farrell’s discoveries regarding the ‘invasive’ plants and common English garden plants that were actually colonial imports. Farrell’s lyrical exploration of being othered by the idea of ‘Englishness’ is something I understood, also being an immigrant, though I am white and this has saved me from the worst aspects of British xenophobia. This is also a book for anyone who is breaking ground—in a country garden—or on a patio or sterile patch of grass as I am now doing. An inspiring meditation on gardening, an important work of anti-colonial literature, and sublime piece of nature writing

This is the third time I have read this book. It was once sort of escapist 'comfort' reading for me but some how this time I lost patience with the melodrama and histrionics and the weird pacing at the end.

An extraordinary work of experiential archaeology & archeological psychogeography. Barthelmess' work with the sun and the tomb is groundbreaking in terms of our understanding of these ancestral spaces.

Revisiting this--the racism is really hard to get around, despite it being such a formative work for my younger self. Not sure about the forward by Frieda Hughes, though her anecdotes are useful in understanding some of the ghoulish obsession with Plath's death among certain people. But none can approach the work as anything but a critical reader--no one owns the meaning of the work, not even people related to the poet, especially Hughes. There is a lot to think about here.

Revisiting this after 25 years. I still have my copy from 1999, purchased in Rome, with the price sticker on it-- 14000 lire.

When I read this as a young woman I thought more about London and Septimus' suicide. Now I see the book is really about menopause.

I read this in preparation to my visit to the newly reopened Hunterian in London. This short, brutal novel weaves the lives and deaths of John Hunter and one of his specimens--all were reluctant but O'Brien requested specifically not to end up in Hunter's hands after his death. For years, even in my lifetime, his skeleton was displayed int the museum against his wishes. Perhaps one of the few improvements in the new museum's curation--he is no longer exhibited. His wishes finally respected. POSSIBLE SPOILER? The women characters in the book (2-3 minor characters) endure the most horrific sexual violence and humiliation. I don't even know how that was adding to this grim book in any way. I really dislike the idea that women characters have to endure rape and torture to convince a reader that things are 'really dark'. I love Mantel's writing but because of this I feel it difficult to recommend the book.