A review by robinwalter
Touch Not the Nettle by Molly Clavering

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was my 12th book for Dean Street December 2023 and the first one I scored 5/5. The last Molly Clavering book I read, "Because of Sam", was almost perfect — warm and sweet and fuzzy with relatable characters and authentically annoying characters, and it wrapped up with a sweet happy ending. I gave it 4.5 out of five because it was a trifle too long. This one gets five because of the complexity and nuance of its characters and for avoiding a trope I loathe. 

I have now read well around 26 "middlebrow" books, almost all of them Dean Street's editions Many I have really enjoyed, one I hated and three I did not finish. All are very character focused, and the ones I like best are the ones where I felt the characters were best developed. The genre was intended for a very specific audience, so a more or less happy ending is more or less guaranteed, but in many of them that sweetness extends to excusing or in some way redeeming basically every negative character. This book did not go there, and that is a major reason why it is my first five-star read for Dean Street December 2023. 

Outside of recreational reading, my primary entertainment comes from East Asian dramas, and a trope there which fills me with fury is the evil mother who is forgiven, despite having no redemption arc and making no changes, simply because of biology. It is not uncommon in some East Asian dramas for the final episodes to include the evil mother's primary victims (her child/ren) apologising to her  after hours and hours of runtime detailing their horrific treatment. They basically grovel   for having dared failed to worship the woman who gave birth to them. There are elements of this mindset in many middlebrow books. Malicious characters act maliciously, do not change but are still forgiven and given a happy ending — especially if they are biological family. "Touch Not the Nettle" completely avoided that aggravating trope. 

We are introduced to the malicious mother right at the beginning of the book, and she is truly a horrible person. She treats everyone horribly, but her daughter especially so. The whole story is built around the daughter escaping her mother, and right to the end, the mother remains an utterly loathsome human being, and her daughter's assessment of her mother as such remains completely unchanged. Hooray! It's a remarkable tribute to the skill of the writer that she manages to give the  bad mother her own happy ending without that character changing at all and in a way that also works in the best interests of the mother's primary victim, her daughter. 

The misanthropic  mother was not the only malicious character the story felt no compulsion to redeem. A central character's sister was even more malignantly malicious than the heroine's mother. She remained evil to the end. No apology was made for her, no free pass given to her. To have two central characters who were simply nasty, malicious people and remained so to the end of the story without impacting on the positive end for the positive characters is such a rare treat that I had to give this book 5 stars. 

Once again Molly Clavering paints beautiful and loving descriptions of the book's setting. Not just its geographical setting, the Scottish Borders she called home, but also its temporal setting. 70 years after the book was written, this passage really resonated with me in today's consumerist, capitalist, climate-killing culture. 

Quite suddenly, when Glede Water beside them had dwindled away to no more than a burn seeping through moss and peat, running small and very clear, creeping round great boulders, they ran into a great shallow cup high among the hills which reared their splendid heads all round its circumference, a cup filled with pale golden light to the brim, so lovely, so remote, so alien to the modern world, where progress had come to mean mass-production and the race to arm, where science and art were turned to purely material advantages or to destruction 

This book was something of a follow-up to "Susan Settles Down" and although the blurb says they can be read in either order, reading that one first did help this one make more sense. One reason I am particularly glad I did read the first book first is that in addition to the truly evil characters who were left that way until their story arc ended, there are three characters from Susan Settles Down who do receive something of a redemption arc. The three gossipy sisters, who come across like the Furies in Susan settles down, start off that way in this book, but by the end of the book we are given a more sympathetic perspective on them and all three of them show signs of personal growth. Once again the fact that Clavering was able to incorporate different outcomes for different types of negative characters really impressed me as a refreshing break from the norm. 

The development of the central romance is also well handled. The two characters are presented sympathetically while displaying their positive and negative personality characteristics. Their happy ending did require what was almost literally an operation of deus ex machina for certain critical secrets to be revealed just in the nick of time, but because the characters were so well drawn, because Clavering had the good sense to acknowledge the rather freakishly fortuitous nature of the key revelation, and especially because it allowed the two without requiring atonement or forgiveness for the two truly nasty characters, the presence of the hand of fate was acceptable. 

In summary, the sheer delight at reading a middlebrow book which candidly admitted that simply giving birth does not make someone a good mother or even a good person guaranteed that I would love this book. The deftness and depth with which Clavering drew her characters ensured that it is now one of my absolute middlebrow favourites.