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4.5 AVERAGE
4.5 AVERAGE
On Monday the 28th May, I went on a trip with four friends to Barnstable. From there we traveled to Exeter along the Tarka Line and drank 12 pints from 12 pubs. By pint number 8 I was feeling a tad grumpy, luckily this pub used books as decoration.
I hate books as decoration and have a rule, if it’s decoration, it’s up for grabs. Telling my companions to shut up, I soothed myself with the first three chapters in a little book and that lifted me back into my companionship and jolly for the next pint. I slipped the book in my bag and read it in one go (whilst drowning myself in tea) the next morning.
In some ways this book is a perfect pick-me-up book. It has little chapters and a simple style which makes it goes down easily…but it’s not as simple as it looks.
Each chapter tells a little story, told from the naive opinion of a little girl, usually with a theme of love, attraction or relationship in some form. The secret of the daisy itself comes from the practice of picking the petals apart and saying ‘she loves me, she loves me not’.
What makes the book particularly interesting is it doesn’t quite tell a whole story. We are given fragments and flecks of the main character’s emotional growth - or the lack of it. We are shown how desperate she is to connect with people and how often those opportunities to connect are snatched away by her slightly distant mother (who it is implied is some sort of prostitute, or at least a ‘good-time-girl’). When she is drawn in to an older man (as a 16 year old girl) and sleeps with him, she imagines having a son - although scared, she is delighted with the idea of having a child to share life with. Though we don’t know if she even is pregnant or what may happen next.
Finally she discovers the love she has been searching for when she visits one of her early nannies in hospital and sees the love in her eyes - I suppose that was the ultimate secret in the daisy.
The narrator is utterly naive, I assumed she was a young child throughout, I’m not sure if this is a failure of the writer or reflection of how her isolated upbringing retards her emotional development. That said, I loved her tone, she is an imaginative character who views most things in original and interesting ways which create a lot of comedy. Each chapter is fun and often funny but the combined effect of those chapters is oddly sad.
A rare book that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I hate books as decoration and have a rule, if it’s decoration, it’s up for grabs. Telling my companions to shut up, I soothed myself with the first three chapters in a little book and that lifted me back into my companionship and jolly for the next pint. I slipped the book in my bag and read it in one go (whilst drowning myself in tea) the next morning.
In some ways this book is a perfect pick-me-up book. It has little chapters and a simple style which makes it goes down easily…but it’s not as simple as it looks.
Each chapter tells a little story, told from the naive opinion of a little girl, usually with a theme of love, attraction or relationship in some form. The secret of the daisy itself comes from the practice of picking the petals apart and saying ‘she loves me, she loves me not’.
What makes the book particularly interesting is it doesn’t quite tell a whole story. We are given fragments and flecks of the main character’s emotional growth - or the lack of it. We are shown how desperate she is to connect with people and how often those opportunities to connect are snatched away by her slightly distant mother (who it is implied is some sort of prostitute, or at least a ‘good-time-girl’). When she is drawn in to an older man (as a 16 year old girl) and sleeps with him, she imagines having a son - although scared, she is delighted with the idea of having a child to share life with. Though we don’t know if she even is pregnant or what may happen next.
Finally she discovers the love she has been searching for when she visits one of her early nannies in hospital and sees the love in her eyes - I suppose that was the ultimate secret in the daisy.
The narrator is utterly naive, I assumed she was a young child throughout, I’m not sure if this is a failure of the writer or reflection of how her isolated upbringing retards her emotional development. That said, I loved her tone, she is an imaginative character who views most things in original and interesting ways which create a lot of comedy. Each chapter is fun and often funny but the combined effect of those chapters is oddly sad.
A rare book that is greater than the sum of its parts.