Reviews

The Home Child is a novel in verse inspired by scant details of the life of the author’s great-aunt Eliza Showell who, as a newly orphaned 12 year old, was sent from Birmingham to Nova Scotia. Those details have been supplemented by research and rich imaginings. The language was utterly gorgeous and I was particularly struck by the nature imagery, the way nature provided a solace for Eliza, and the use of vocabulary and dialect distinct to the Black Country area of the West Midlands. A glossary is helpfully included for readers unfamiliar with that language. I was so impressed by the way the author was able to capture so many facets of the experience of the Home Children in such a slim volume. I loved the way the rhythm of “Wolfville” mirrored that of the train taking Eliza’s boyfriend away from her. Two poems titled “The Word” showcase the negative attitudes many Canadians held towards the Home Children, while the two “They say” poems highlight experiences of real children whose experiences were so much worse than Eliza’s. Each poem stands alone but together they tell a cohesive, convincing and compelling story. This is a book that both captured my heart and broke it. Many thanks to @katie.reads.things for gifting me this book.

Content Warnings

minnietimperley's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

blackcatlouise's review

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challenging informative

5.0

foggy_rosamund's review

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5.0

Between 1860 and 1960 over 100,000 thousand children were sent from Britain's slums and orphanages to work in Canada. These children were separated from any family they had, with no opportunity to return home. The story was that these children were going to begin a better life, but they were essentially unpaid servants with few opportunities, and were often treated with cruelty. Liz Berry's verse-novel focuses on one of these children: Eliza Showell, who was Berry's great-aunt. She follows Eliza's life from her birth in a slum in Bilston through her journey across the ocean to Cape Breton in Canada, where she lived out her life.

This is Liz Berry's second full length collection, and it is astonishing. Berry takes the scanty facts she knows of Eliza Showell's life, and creates a rich and tender portrait of her beginning with the love she feels from her mother, and the joy she finds in her home, where she is, "Little queen of Fiery Holes / with her back-to-back court, all its slum / and love, its cram like a burrow." Berry's poetry is lyrical, joyful and constantly inventive, finding the beauty and newness of small things, even in the midst of Eliza's loneliness. In Cape Breton, "the loneliness was so deep, / a field chest-high of snow / she stumbled through, shivering; / a night without stars or moon". Here, Eliza meets another home child, a boy from Glasgow, and slowly the two find solace together: "gentle / as osses at the water-trough." The poems build to a final piece, written in Eliza's voice at the end of her life: this last poem, looking back over Eliza's days, is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking things I've ever read, and though it is only a few pages long, it's so expansive and moving that it seems to hold a whole world.

Though the story is simple, Berry's deep exploration of emotion and of place, as well as her use of dialect words, rhyme and rhythm, make this feel like an epic. Each poem, read individually, is considered and inventive, but as a whole the pieces work together to create an immersive and tender story, that travels further than its simple structure. I read this in a day -- I couldn't put it down -- and immediately wanted to read it again. Magical.