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This book was named after the last Celtic kingdom, which even after it was no longer known as Elmet kept that place's reputation in to the seventeenth century, as 'a 'badlands', a sanctuary for refugees from the law.'
Cathy and David's Daddy is one such refugee. Paid to fight for bets, he disappears for weeks at a time until the children's mother has left and their grandmother dies, when he takes them to live in an isolated copse, building a house for the three of them to live alone in.
They grow in the forest, hunting the animals for food, singing in to the night and carving out furniture in the day. The first part of the book goes on in an idyll like this; Daniel looks back on his life with his family, his Daddy always at the centre.
His father is certainly an impressive character, one at once brutally violent and unbelievably gentle. He kills animals but in a kind way with a clean break of their neck, beats a man almost to death but only to get him to return money owed to a disabled man, is terrifying to most he meets apart from his children, for whom he will do anything.
But the land he has built a home on does not belong to him, and he must fight again to keep it.
I thought this book was masterful. The writing is beautiful, the characters are fully formed and the ending was a dark but pleasant surprise. There is a lot of violence in the final scene, and I was almost ready to stop reading, particularly when it looked like there was going to be a rape scene but just when I was about to give up I guessed where the scene was going and sure enough was not disappointed. Cathy is brilliant, and the writer does well at setting her up to be a fighter like her father throughout the book so that her fierceness at the end feels natural. In a strange way the book turns out to have been about Cathy all along, on finishing I could look back and see how she had been important even in her absences.
I think sometimes the dialogue did turn very unnatural but I accepted it as a stylistic choice - when it was more of a conversation it was in a Yorkshire dialect, whereas when a character was telling a story it seemed to become more elaborate and far less like speech, but this I felt was inkeeping with the almost medieval feel the story had in parts. There were a very few bits I might have cut down, but not many - for the most part I could sit back and be absorbed in the story and not notice any flaws in the writing.
I think Mozley proves herself a real talent in this and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next.
Cathy and David's Daddy is one such refugee. Paid to fight for bets, he disappears for weeks at a time until the children's mother has left and their grandmother dies, when he takes them to live in an isolated copse, building a house for the three of them to live alone in.
They grow in the forest, hunting the animals for food, singing in to the night and carving out furniture in the day. The first part of the book goes on in an idyll like this; Daniel looks back on his life with his family, his Daddy always at the centre.
His father is certainly an impressive character, one at once brutally violent and unbelievably gentle. He kills animals but in a kind way with a clean break of their neck, beats a man almost to death but only to get him to return money owed to a disabled man, is terrifying to most he meets apart from his children, for whom he will do anything.
But the land he has built a home on does not belong to him, and he must fight again to keep it.
I thought this book was masterful. The writing is beautiful, the characters are fully formed and the ending was a dark but pleasant surprise. There is a lot of violence in the final scene, and I was almost ready to stop reading, particularly when it looked like there was going to be a rape scene but just when I was about to give up I guessed where the scene was going and sure enough was not disappointed. Cathy is brilliant, and the writer does well at setting her up to be a fighter like her father throughout the book so that her fierceness at the end feels natural. In a strange way the book turns out to have been about Cathy all along, on finishing I could look back and see how she had been important even in her absences.
I think sometimes the dialogue did turn very unnatural but I accepted it as a stylistic choice - when it was more of a conversation it was in a Yorkshire dialect, whereas when a character was telling a story it seemed to become more elaborate and far less like speech, but this I felt was inkeeping with the almost medieval feel the story had in parts. There were a very few bits I might have cut down, but not many - for the most part I could sit back and be absorbed in the story and not notice any flaws in the writing.
I think Mozley proves herself a real talent in this and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next.