June 30, 2008
According to family legend, members of Katherine Millar's family “get the key of the door and the hammer of doom at the same time” when they come of age. Which is why Long opens her clever fourth novel with Kat expecting the worst on her 18th birthday. An outcast at school, Kat longs to break away from the suffocating English village of Bank Top. As she wraps up exams and considers her next step, however, a boy turns Kat's world upside-down—leaving her to question everything she's been told about her father, who fell to the family curse in a fatal accident, and her mother, who abandoned Kat shortly thereafter. Long brings to life a host of quirky characters, including Poll, Kat's nearly blind and caustic paternal grandmother who raised her, and Poll's constant companion, Dickie the Dogman, a scavenger who regularly brings gifts of fatty bacon or vacuum cleaner attachments. Long's prose is faithful to the regional dialect, and the story effortlessly encapsulates the end of adolescence and Kat's mixed emotions as she redefines her notion of family and strikes out on her own.
August 1, 2008
Longs new novel is similar to her international best-seller The Bad Mothers Handbook (2004) in its focus on a three-generational family of women in the Lancashire village of Bank Top. As she turns 18, Katherine Millar, who keeps the remains of two dead relatives in her bedroom, is increasingly resentful of her sight-impaired grandmother, Pollyana, who raised her after her mother took off when Kat was an infant. A big girl, Kat makes up for awkwardness and social ineptness with keen scholarship and looks to the local librarian for approval; yet her hopes for the future may be jinxed by Polls needs. Told by Kat with alternating narration by her mother, the story ranges across infidelity, untimely accidental death, abandonment, eating disorders, and the cruelty of children. Even with a satisfactory resolution and flashes of wit and humor, not enough love breaks through the dysfunction to evoke the warmth that was so winning in Longs earlier work. Still, this is a heartfelt exploration of the meaning of family that will certainly be of interest to readers of The Bad Mothers Handbook.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)