Guest review by Fran Clark: KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN by Sadeqa Johnson

 

"For readers who enjoy historical fiction inspired by real events, this is a must-read. It is also a masterclass for writers who want to understand how powerful emotional storytelling is achieved."

Fran Clark writes emotive women’s fiction inspired by the connection between London and the Caribbean. With titles including The Long Way Home, However Far We Fall and Wherever You Will Go, her work explores themes of identity, family, and resilience, often shaped by the storytelling traditions of her Dominican heritage. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and lives in the English countryside, where she also runs two community choirs and teaches vocals. Fran writes contemporary fiction as Rosa Temple.

Set in post-war Germany and the United States, Keeper of Lost Children confirms why Sadeqa Johnson has become one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary historical fiction. With its sweeping scope, emotional depth and compelling characters, it is easy to understand the anticipation that greeted its release.

The novel follows three interconnected storylines: a Black American soldier who is stationed in Germany after the war; a young girl who has always felt out of place in the family that raised her; and the wife of a Black officer based in Germany whose deepest wish is to conceive a child.

The emotional threads of each narrative gradually intertwine as the protagonists negotiate love, loss, identity and a programme that gave abandoned mixed-race German orphans the opportunity to find families after World War II.

I loved the gentle yet compelling language Johnson uses to weave this story together. She doesn't shy away from difficult subjects such as racism, alcoholism, abortion and abuse, but handles them in a way that feels authentic, necessary and never gratuitous. With every chapter, I found myself wishing I had discovered this author sooner, completely engrossed in a story inspired by real-life events.

This was a book I could not put down. As someone who isn't a particularly fast reader, I found myself frustrated by how long it took me to reach the end because I wanted to consume it all at once. That said, this is not a novel to rush through. Every scene feels purposeful and every page rewards careful attention.

The way seemingly unconnected strangers become linked across decades and continents creates a powerful sense of drama and emotional momentum. The author's use of dialogue never feels strained or artificial, and there were times when I felt as though I was living alongside these characters rather than reading about them. By the end, they felt like real people whose company I was reluctant to leave.

A couple of the central characters occasionally veered towards the saccharine, particularly given the hardships they endured, but Johnson wisely balances this by showing their flaws as well as their virtues. They make mistakes, experience envy, wrestle with difficult choices and suffer consequences, all of which make them feel more human and believable. Although each character faces an emotionally and physically arduous path, I honestly couldn't decide which storyline I found the most distressing.

Despite the immense hardship woven throughout the novel, there is also a sense of hope. Much of the book's emotional power comes from watching these characters navigate loss, uncertainty and disappointment while continuing to move forward.

I have no hesitation in recommending this book, and I have already added Johnson's backlist to my ever-growing to-be-read list.

Keeper of Lost Children is a classy and deeply moving work of historical fiction. Johnson demonstrates how emotion can be evoked through character, dialogue and circumstance rather than simply explained to the reader. In an era when many novels tell us what their characters feel rather than allowing us to experience those emotions for ourselves, that skill feels increasingly rare. For readers who enjoy historical fiction inspired by real events, this is a must-read. It is also a masterclass for writers who want to understand how powerful emotional storytelling is achieved.

Keeper of Lost Children is published by Renegade

Fran's latest novel, However Far We Fall, is available now. 

Guest review by Jane Rogers: OPEN WATER by Caleb Azumah Nelson

"Since I finished the book its mood and flavour have haunted me and I’ve found myself thinking, with great admiration, of how technically accomplished this writer is."

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her dystopia Body Tourists is now available in paperback. For more information, see Jane's website.

This novel deservedly won the Costa First novel award in 2021. It’s narrated in the second person by a young Black man living in London. (And incidentally, it is the most successful novel-long use of the second person that I have come across. Often the second person starts to feel clunky or contrived, but here it simply pulls the reader into intimacy with the narrator.)

He meets a girl and falls in love, but nothing in his life is simple; the girl is his best friend’s girlfriend and both of them are riddled with guilt about betraying the best friend. He’s grieving for the death of his grandparents and also utterly weary of the casual racism and violence served up as standard to a young Black man in London. He’s tired of being an outsider, tired of being afraid, tired of trying to hide his fear. Nevertheless there are moments of joy and freedom, when he reaches ‘open water’: when his girlfriend tells him she loves him; when he dances at an all-Black jazz club; when he dances at Notting Hill Carnival.

This book made a huge impression on me because it’s the first thing I’ve read which has absolutely taken me inside the experience of a young Black man. I thought I understood racism, but here the reader experiences it with the narrator, and that is qualitatively different to understanding it in theory. There’s a troubled, alienated flavour to the writing, which circles around from the chronological progress of the love affair, to touch on events in the recent and distant past; at times the reader is as bewildered and lost as the narrator. But Azumah Nelson skilfully holds the novel together with key phrases which are repeated and riffed upon, in a way more reminiscent of poetry or jazz, than prose fiction. The narrator asks himself repeatedly, ‘How do you feel?’ and the use of second person makes this a question for the reader as much as the character. He refers to being ‘seen’ by other Black people, and most especially by the girl he loves; the police, who stop him and accuse him of robbery, look at him but do not see him. In this book Black people are rarely ‘seen’ as individual human beings worthy of respect, by the White population. And the painful questions, ‘What is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?’ recur in different orders, referring to different kinds of love and heartbreak, throughout the novel. Since I finished the book its mood and flavour have haunted me and I’ve found myself thinking, with great admiration, of how technically accomplished this writer is.

Open Water is published by Penguin.

Jane is a regular contributor to Writers Review. Here are more of her choices:

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"In spite of the grimness and its foundation in reality, The Nickel Boys somehow isn't an overwhelmingly bleak read."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her latest publication is This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

There's something so mesmerising about Colson Whitehead's writing. I wondered what he'd do to follow his harrowing epic of slavery, The Underground Railroad, and this is it - a shorter, slimmer novel than its predecessor. (He's since written another, during lockdown - Harlem Shuffle). Both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead the fourth American writer to win this prestigious award twice.

While The Underground Railroad employs magical realism in its portrayal of the escape routes for slaves in the southern states, imagining an actual secret underground rail network with tunnels, stations, sidings and escape hatches to the surface, we're in realistic territory here. The story is simpler, yet every bit as gripping. 

We follow the fortunes of Elwood Curtis, a bright African-American boy brought up in Florida by his grandmother, "a slight humming-bird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose", to be serious, responsible and ambitious. It's the 1960s, when segregation under the Jim Crow laws has only recently ended, not yet to much effect. Scholarly, teaching himself from the single volume of an encyclopaedia that comes his way by chance, and inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, which he plays repeatedly from the single record he owns, Elwood vows always to follow the great man's guidance. Once, attending a demonstration for which he's later punished by his grandmother, he "felt closer to himself for a moment". Helped by a teacher who sees his intelligence and ambition, he wins a scholarship to a college founded to help young people from poor backgrounds. But his ambition is immediately thwarted when, hitching a lift for his first journey to the college, he's unfairly implicated in car theft and with no more than minimal investigation sent to a harsh reform school, Nickel.

Endearingly idealistic, Elwood vows even here to make the best of his situation, earn points for good conduct and to be released as early as possible. But the school's promises are hollow ones. The story's split structure moves us forward to the nineteen-eighties, where we learn that excavations of the school's old site prior to the construction of an office park and lunch plaza have revealed not only graves marked perfunctorily by crosses but other human bodies as well. "Even in death, the boys were trouble." Elwood, apparently, has weathered his ordeal, building a new life and a successful business, yet the scars remain. The discovery of the bodies prompts a small group of former inmates either to hide or excavate their own archaeology. 

Moving back and forth in time, we experience daily life at Nickel - the meagre rations, the punishments and other abuses, the hard labour and the trips 'out back' from which some boys never return. Supposedly a school, it offers little educational stimulus to a bright and inquisitive boy like Elwood, and there is racial segregation here, as in the world outside - the new black arrivals are given clothing that's already threadbare. Of Elwood's friendship with the more cynical Jack Turner, Whitehead has said that these characters represent two different sides of his own personality: Elwood Curtis is "the optimistic or hopeful part of me that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it", while Jack Turner represents "the cynical side that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder and slavery, and it will always be that way." A long-kept secret about the escape from Nickel packs a powerful punch at the end.

The Nickel Boys is based on a real reform school run by the state of Florida, the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys, subject to a similar investigation after the discovery of bodies, amounting now to some 81. My reading took place against a background of disturbing news from America: the overturning of abortion rights in some states, more mass shootings alongside plans to extend rights to gun ownership, while the hearing was in progress to investigate Trump's incitement of supporters to storm the Capitol. Sometimes the era of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan doesn't seem all that long ago; in fact the KKK still exists, and the ugly, misogynist, white supremacist side of America is all too visible. 

In spite of the grimness and its foundation in reality, The Nickel Boys somehow isn't an overwhelmingly bleak read - I think because of the hope, dignity and perseverance Elwood somehow manages to maintain, our total immersion in his world and our belief that he'll come through.

I'll certainly read more of Colson Whitehead. Next will be his latest, Harlem Shuffle.

The Nickel Boys is published by Doubleday.

More of Linda's recent choices:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf

Guest review by Jane Russ: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, revisited

 

 "The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th..."

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

 I asked if I could review an old book, something well loved and read by millions. A book that most readers would know but which has come sharply into focus since 25 May 2020: the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird at school in about 1967 when I was fifteen. The story gripped me and, I am ashamed to admit, I still have my original (stolen) school copy beside me as I write! I was older than the narrator Scout Finch but not so much older that the antics of her day to day life failed to resonated with me, in all their glorious detail.

It was another fifty years before I read it again. I have occasionally been disappointed on re-reading a book I loved the first time around: not so with this one. This second reading threw up all the touch points of my own lived experience and I found I loved it even more. I was shocked by the nuance I missed originally, but what fifteen-year-old knows about nuance? Then I read it a third time in February this year; to see if there were things I had forgotten that could help me understand the horrors going on in America today. Not just the George Floyd murder but the insurrection too.

The novel at its simplest is a tale of two children growing up in the deeply segregated world of Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1930s. The narrator is a young adult looking back on her childhood. Scout is six when the story begins and her elder brother Jem is ten. Their mother died four years before and Scout and Jem are devoted to their father Atticus, the town’s attorney. Atticus believes in never talking down to children and always answering every question: helping them to understand the world around them. The mother figure in the story is Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, who loves the children as her own and has high standards of behaviour, which Scout and Jem work diligently to ignore. The third child we come to know and love is Dill, who comes every summer to stay with his aunt in the house next door. A fatherless, slightly old-fashioned, only child from Meridian, Mississippi, Dill is the catalyst the other two need for all that follows.

Written with a flowing natural style that effortlessly draws you into Scout’s world, it deals with major issues of the day in a clear gritty way and it is also very funny. In the final storyline, it seems perfectly natural that Scout, dressed as a ham, should be walking home in the dark with Jem after a school event. The ham plays an important role in the end-game. In fact, it could be said that without the ham she would be dead.

Whilst encircled by sharply-observed descriptions of their neighbours and Dill’s obsession with trying to get the recluse Boo Radley to come out of his house, the book has at its core Atticus’ defence of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Bob Ewell, a poor white farmer living with his large brood of children in virtual destitution on the outskirts of the town, accuses his black neighbour Tom Robinson of raping his eldest daughter Mayella. By the time the trial starts, Atticus has already saved Tom from a lynching by a crowd of men who turn up at the jail where he is being held. Scout, Jem and Dill sneak out at night and arrive just before the men. Scout unknowingly defuses the anger in the men when she spots the father of a classmate and speaks to him about his son. Her innocence and kindness prompt Mr. Cunningham to tell the other men to go home. This scene is the start of Scout’s understanding that nothing is fair for black people. (NB: The book was written only five years after the well-publicised lynching of teenager Emmett Till in 1955.)

Bob Ewell, in the eyes of the town is the lowest of the low but inherent racism tops even this and Tom Robinson in the ‘court’ of Maycomb is guilty before the trial starts. The judge sets Atticus to defend Tom as he knows Atticus to be an honest man who will not just put on a show of defence but the real thing; that is exactly what Atticus does. Scout, Jem and Dill, unbeknownst to Atticus, watch the whole trial from the ‘coloured gallery’, where they are brought to the front, known as they are to be Calpurnia’s charges and Atticus’ children. One thing that shocks white sensibilities at the trial is that Tom admits he felt sorry for Mayella being forced to look after her many siblings and her unpleasant father when her mother dies. In a segregated world how dare a black man have the temerity to feel sorry for a white man; even a Ewell. Even though it becomes obvious that Tom was physically incapable of giving Mayella the beating she received (he has a withered arm) the jury, after a very long deliberation, still finds him guilty.

As the story progresses there are things we discover and consider. This is where reading this book as an adult gives you a different perspective; the lessons are the same, just in sharper focus.

Prejudice of all kinds, be it based on religion, skin colour, age or anything else, is abhorrent.

This is something left for the reader to infer from the many characters in the book. As Miss Maudie says “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Atticus, when discussing the court-room verdict, says to Jem. “The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be he any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.’

The majority of people are good at heart. As Scout says to Atticus after realising that Arthur Radley saved her. “Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

There are so many things to take from this book. Not least the realisation that although laws may change, attitudes passed from generation to generation of people needing to find a scapegoat for their own failings, will be hard to change. The end of the Civil War and the American government’s inability to deal with the problem of how to integrate slaves into society, is a harvest still being reaped to this day. ‘Forty Acres and A Mule’ for liberated slaves, meant that someone somewhere, felt aggrieved that they were not included, particularly poor whites. The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th and it is no coincidence that the Confederate flag was much in evidence on that day.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an easy read, just right for a teenage mind needing a story that pulls you along but it is of course so much more than that. I hope I have inspired you to get back to it and give it another viewing; you will not be disappointed.

To Kill a Mockingbird is published by Cornerstone.

By Jane Russ:

Guest review by Berlie Doherty: THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd

Berlie Doherty writes novels, plays, stories and poetry for all ages, and is

translated into over twenty languages. She has written over 60 books, several

of which have been dramatised for radio, television and the stage. She has won

many awards around the world, including the Carnegie Medal twice (for

Dear Nobody andGranny was a Buffer Girl). Her subjects cover many different

genres, from folk and fairy tales and historical fiction to enduring contemporary

novels. Her most recent children's novel is Far From Home, a companion book

to Street Child. Her adult novel Requiem was recently re-published by

Cybermouse Books.

www.berliedoherty.com

I picked up the book because the title intrigued me. The fact that it

was published 15 years ago, and had been on the New York Times
best-seller list despite being a debut novel, won awards and had been
made into a major film had completely passed me by, maybe because
there are simply so many excellent and award-winning books around.
We can't read them all, never mind giving ourselves the luxury of
loving them. I read this book quickly and compulsively, enjoying the
rare condition of having become completely absorbed in a novel.
It doesn't happen so often these days. I think my delight in the book
has as much to do with the beguiling voice of the narrator as with
the plot itself, which is both harrowing and uplifting. When I tell
people about the best books I've read this year, and many of them 
very powerful and memorable pieces of writing, this is the one I want
to hug.

In many ways The Secret Life of Bees affected me as much as To Kill
a Mocking Bird did many years ago, though it is less ambitious and
distressing in its political message. It is set in South Carolina in 1964,
the year of the American Civil Rights Act.  The 14 year old white central
character, Lily Owens, is told by her abusive father, T-Ray, that she fatally
shot her mother when she was four years old. This is the central motivation
of the plot, which takes Lily on a personal mission away from her home
to try to discover the truth.  She has in her possession a photograph of
her mother and a picture of a black Madonna. Hitch-hiking with her is
the family's black maid, Rosaleen, who had been arrested and attacked
for spoiling a white man's shoes on her way to registering to vote for the
very first time. Lily rescues her from hospital, sure in herself that the only
hope for either of them is in leaving her father and the home-town of
Sylvan. The honey-farm in Tiburon where they end up is run by the black
Boatwright sisters, and it is here that Lily begins to find peace and a
knowledge of self-value. It is a coming-of-age novel in which we share the
experience and personal journey of a teenage girl who has seen and
experienced violence, death, grief, loss and love. I have no intention of
plot-spoiling by telling any more of what happens.

So what about this intriguing title? The story begins when Lily is woken up
by a swarm of bees in her room. When she drags T-Ray in to help her get
rid of them, the bees have gone. Her totem, hidden in a box that is buried
in her garden, is a picture of a black Madonna, with Tiburon written on the
back, and it is only when she arrives in that town that she discovers the same
label on a jar of honey. When she is given shelter by the Boatwright sisters,
she helps with the tending of the hives and the harvesting of honey. Every
chapter begins with a fascinating little piece about the behaviour of bees,
and the metaphor of the beehive is realised in the Boatwright household,
the symbol of companionship, community, busyness, female power
and ultimate reward.

I have recently seen the film, and was relieved to see that it is a very faithful
portrayal of the novel, at times deeply moving, and with some beautiful
performances. Visually of course the film gives us a much stronger impression
of the period; in the novel the characters are timeless, especially Lily and the
Boatwright sisters, and it comes as quite a surprise to see them dressed in
sixties clothes and enjoying sixties music. The film gives a vivid visual reminder
of racial hatred and ignorance which is extremely painful to watch. But then,
of course, it goes for a slightly softer ending, with just a few more
heart-warming tweaks than the novelist imagined.