CHOO! CHOO! The 2023 Booker Train journey is officially over! (With a little less than a week to spare!) Siân Hughes’s Pearl ( W. F. Howes Ltd 2023) is a slim little volume. I decided to read the audiobook as the print copies won’t be available until the end of the month, and I am glad I ended with it. Pearl is certainly one of my favorites from the longlist.
Marianne’s mother went missing when she was 8. She just left and never came back, and Marianne struggles with that her entire life. She is consumed with grief and guilt and anger. There’s a lovely section where she talks about being asked if there is a history of madness in her family, and she interrupts and says that there is a history of grief, because madness and grief are the same. She is afraid of becoming like her mother, of leaving the daughter that she says she’d been looking for in bad decisions and dead ends, and she makes bargains about how long she’ll need to stick around before becoming like her mother.
But this short novel is her coming to the realization that her mother wasn’t crazy, wasn’t unhappy, wasn’t haunting her. It takes a lot of growing up to get there – Marianne develops an eating disorder, she cuts herself, she self-sabotages. When she’s 16, she has an unhealthy relationship with Emily, the daughter of her father’s boss, who wields a secret that could dismantle everything. She ends up at a solstice barbeque and wonders if perhaps her mother was pagan. She struggles to formulate her memories and make sense of them in relation to what others remember. She tries to find her mother in children’s stories, nursey rhymes, legends, and lore.
Each chapter begins with a nursery rhyme or childhood game. The title itself derives from a poem of the same name – a poem that Marianne thinks holds the clue to her mother’s disappearance. And this old English poem becomes extremely important to Marianne as she struggles to find understanding as she grows up.
It’s a novel of a mother’s love and a child’s loss. It’s a novel of misadventure, forgiveness, and finally letting go.
Read this book.
Booker count 13 of 13.
A Girl Named Tommi 