The Story of Us by Felicity Everett
Back in 1982 there were five girls sharing a house in Brighton. Their course works takes second place to demos, parties and no-strings sex for Stella, Bridget, Vinnie, Maxine and Nell but it's against the background of Greenham Common and the miners' strike that the girls realise that life is not quite as straight forward as they imagined. They will forge friendships in Albacore Street which might occasionally be stretched to the limit, but they'll never be completely forgotten. Having met them back in the eighties we meet them again two decades later when they're struggling to cope with all that life throws at them.
| The Story of Us by Felicity Everett | |
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| Category: Women's Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: The story of five students in the nineteen eighties and the women the become twenty years later. Intriguing story. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 352 | Date: March 2011 |
| Publisher: Arrow | |
| ISBN: 978-0099553694 | |
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It's a great group of girls. Vinnie's outrageous, but she's the child of stage parents and is aiming to go down the same road herself. Stella is at the other end of the scale. She's recovering from a broken romance. It's Bridget who invites her into the house, but Vinnie who influences her most. Maxine will find her own sexuality. Nell is obsessed by one of her lecturers and can't see the writing on the wall, despite what everyone else tries to tell her.
Felicity Everett has those eighties girls to perfection. It's how everyone thought the sixties were despite a lack of evidence to confirm it. Sex really was more open, less shameful and fun. Students began to be political in the sixties but by the eighties it was widespread and a major part of what being a student was about. You'll get a real feel for this in The Story of Us. To some extent I found that the girls blended into each other in their student days but they blossomed as individuals when we meet them again in their forties.
It's personal problems which occupy the women's minds after the turn of the century. Relationships and marriages are strained to breaking point. Children grow up much earlier and want plastic surgery in their teens. But it's a tragedy which brings the girls back together as they work out how they must each survive what has happened to them.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
For more of Brighton we can recommend the Roy Grace crime novels by Peter James. For more of the early nineteen-eighties, try Love Falls by Esther Freud. You might also appreciate Losing It by Cora Carmack, although we found it a bit superficial.
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