Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies
Deborah Kay Davies is one of those writers who does dark brilliantly.
Her first novel True Things About Me (my review) was disturbing yet unputdownable – about a thrill-seeking young woman who gets into an abusive relationship. Her second novel, the Baileys longlisted Reasons She Goes to the Woods is also disturbing and unputdownable…
It’s about a child, Pearl, and her family. There’s her little brother The Blob, there’s her mother and her beloved Daddy. The book’s blurb quotes from the nursery rhyme There was a little girl, (which was actually written by Longfellow, I found out!).
When she was good
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.
Except that Pearl is more often horrid than good. She’s an experimenter on other people – when she gets found out, they don’t like it – especially her mother who punishes her. She hides in the woods behind their house. It soon becomes clear that the mother has mental health problems, and Pearl gets blamed, and as she grows up and becomes a teenager, her experiments get nastier, and her mother carries on getting worse. Her poor beloved Daddy is beside himself with worry.
Some might say that the outcome of the novel is predictable given Pearl’s seeming single-mindedness in her actions; the route to get there though is not so obvious and builds up gradually over the course of the book.
The author, tells the story with a great deal of style. Although the book is nominally 250 pages long, only half the pages contain the story. Each pair of pages contains a one or two word heading on the left, and then a single paragraph that fills the page on the right. So the book is only really about 120 pages long.
Each right hand page is a vignette recounting one snapshot of Pearl’s life, moving from primary school through to teenage years. The extract below is the last third of the first of these little stories that make up the whole:
The living room is quiet. In the entire world there is only Pearl and her father. Her mother laid a fire before she went out; taking ages, leaving instructions, dropping things, then slamming the door and coming back. Now Pearl listens to the sounds coming from the grate as the flames lick each other and purr. From the place pressed against her father’s knee she feels a rippling sensation move through her body, as if a delicate, frilled mushroom were expanding, elongating, filling her up. She exhales slowly. She mustn’t disturb him. He would push her off with his beautiful hands if he woke up.
Told in the present tense, there is a dreamy otherworldliness about Pearl’s actions that belies the fact that a lot of what she does is downright nasty. It’s clear that the mother-daughter relationship never happened and that she idolises her father. She also has a controlling relationship with her few friends, and The Blob too of course. After all, Pearl only wants one thing …
Deborah Kay Davies has again probed the dark side of relationships – different ones this time. I wonder where she’ll go for her next novel? As I said at the top, this book is disturbing and unputdownable, an uneasy but thought-provoking read. (8.5/10)
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Source: Publisher – thank you! To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies, pub Feb 2014 by Oneworld, 250pp, Hardback.
My initial reaction is that this isn’t the book for me, but I love writers who are doing something different with narrative organisation so at some point this is going to have to find its way onto my list.
The structure worked well for me. The subject matter is not so nice!
I almost put it down after reading the passage you quoted. Decided not to because it is such a short book. Half-way through now and my sense of unease is not easing … Neither can I say I’m enjoying it.
It’s great writing about nasty things – her first book was the same. Does make you very uneasy.
Not a novel I’ve heard of but it sounds very interesting, and despite its darkness quite appealing.
I’m still unsettled by my own reading of this book. Not an easy book, but a fabulous writer.
Snap! I’ve just posted my review of this one too 🙂 You liked it a lot more than I did, but I’m a lot less tolerant of experimental writing styles than you.
Sounds really creepy. But in a really interesting way. I think it shows special skills when an author is able to portray an odd, unpleasant character like this in a way where the reader still wants to read on to the end.