The Stopping Place by Helen Slavin

The Stopping Place by Helen Slavin
Buy The Stopping Place by Helen Slavin at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Summary: A book that promises nothing and delivers everything. A wonderful intrigue about a life hidden from view.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 240	Date: April 2010
Publisher: Pocket Books
ISBN: 978-1847391865
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How often do you pick up a book with no idea at all where it is likely to lead? How often does such a book still have you wondering a hundred pages in? Not bemused, not lost, absolutely sure that it is going to lead somewhere, but still with no clue as to exactly where. How often do you get to the end of a book and think, simply, "Wow!"?

Assuming you read voraciously, then such an experience probably happens once or twice a year. How often, I ask again, does it happen without draining you emotionally? How often, is that "wow" reserved simply for the craft of the thing?

This is the effect Helen Slavin created with The Stopping Place.

My Weekly suggests that it will charm, move and scare you in equal measure. In the event, it did none of those things. If asked, I'd have said that a work of fiction that doesn't engage you on a fundamental emotional level isn't working.

I would have been wrong.

Although I identified in many ways with the narrator of the Stopping Place, know that I would empathise with her, be there for her, if I were part of her circle, somehow I didn't fear for her, didn't weep for her. Maybe, because I do know her, and therefore knew she could handle this…

Instead, the Stopping Place engaged me on an intellectual level – the way Christie or Conan Doyle does. I wanted to work out what was going to happen, what had happened, what might or could have happened but won't or didn't.

It intrigued.

All the way through. From Ruby's comments about the language tapes at the library, to the knot-tying epilogue when most has been revealed and the rest already guessed at. Quite simply, the pages turned because I needed to know if I was right and where I was wrong.

Or maybe they turned because there were so many echoes of the ordinary… places, people, situations… the familiar. Maybe it is the unswerving reality of the piece that works so well.

Slavin writes in detail. She sees people both as they project themselves, and how they are underneath. I suspect she's an unnerving person to meet at a party. She captures places. She distils poetry out of the ordinary with no resort to lyricism. Her words are pared down, but capture the essence of things: she has a Masters in the art of metaphor, slipping in descriptions that work so perfectly you miss them.

Ruby lives alone. She works as an assistant at the library, restocking the shelves, checking out the books, helping out with the computer queries. Her evenings are long and lonely. Her wardrobe is threadbare and she barely notices. She fills her free time with self-improvement classes and trying to forget.

She watches her colleagues and learns their secrets, and protects them (colleagues and secrets alike).

She is in control. A non-entity walking through a life of fear, making an occasional phone call to hear a voice she dare not respond to.

She feels that she is a nobody. Deliberately so. She is happy, enough, with that.

Then she is allowed access to the hallowed portals of the archives, and finds the photographic treasury of a lady of the manor from a century ago. Her own intellect re-ignited, it is as though she might finally find a purpose, a reason to stay, something to achieve.

But Ruby knows about history. History, after all, is just an accumulation of secrets – the intended ones, and those simply lost to the mists of time. She knows that taking a spoon and stirring it is not, necessarily, a good idea.

The Stopping Place is an unusual novel; original, teasing, leavened with a touch of wry humour, and a moment or two of near farce, best read with no preconceptions at all and ultimately rewarding. Flawless.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

Further reading suggestion: to suggest what might tie in with this book would give you the preconceptions you should approach it without! As for once the blurb writers haven’t given much away, I salute them and leave you to explore in like spirit.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Stopping Place by Helen Slavin at Amazon.com.

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