Paradise Girl by Phill Featherstone
| Paradise Girl by Phill Featherstone | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: A good solid plot, but the characterisation is weak. Good enough to make me want to see how it would play out, but I couldn’t help feeling it needed a tighter edit and stronger characters. | |
| Buy? No | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 288 | Date: January 2017 |
| Publisher: Matador | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1785898723 | |
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Kerryl Shaw lives on a Yorkshire farm – a somewhat idealised one that survives on a few hens and two or three cows and a few sheep. The kind of farm that might have been profitable in the 1950s but by the time Kerryl has arrived should have been struggling. A teenage boy not pulling his weight, now that the grandparents are old and the father is dead, would not be met with exasperated indulgence. There are no stock-hands, no farm managers, no applications for subsidies, or worries about the tax return. Maybe the unwelcome wind turbine covers the costs of the rest of it.
Already, in setting, it's feeling a little unreal. But maybe we can forgive that…
Or not.
What is really good about Paradise Girl is the plot. It is plausible, holds tight to the farm and the market town below it and focusses entirely on Kerryl, the eponymous Paradise Girl. Only she's no longer living in paradise. A new virus has erupted in Africa, with a 10-day incubation period with no symptoms, transmissible by close proximity, and deadly within a few days. It mutates from host to host and spreads too rapidly for any kind of containment or vaccination. Africa is devastated, then Europe, and so it makes its way to England and an isolated Yorkshire farm.
It's a modern variant on the black death – only worse. This time, virtually no-one recovers. This could be the plague to end all plagues.
Except, Kerryl is still alive. And she believes that her twin brother is still out there somewhere too. Thinking her own end cannot be far away she starts to write a couple of journals, one of which is about Before…how this came to be. The other is 'now': the day to day story of the few days she has left.
As a plot – the spread of the virus, the politicking that goes on around it, the web-chatter of those who don't believe what they're being told. All of that rings true. The underlying thread of what happens next on the farm as the family become infected. That I can also buy into. I struggle with the idea that the virus is so infectious that it can be spread by birds, and by humans in close contact, but that no other animals are affected. It's also uncertain as to whether the disease is infectious or contagious. But again we can set all of that aside. The tension of the first half holds out well; the second section becomes less and less believable sadly…
I say sadly, because I don't think it need do so. My real problem is our diarist. If the characterisation of Kerryl were stronger, the plot holes would almost fix themselves. The segments that don't belong, she'd no longer allow to stand.
I have to confess that I am not the target-audience for this book; I am no longer a young adult by any stretch of the imagination. That might colour my judgement. On the other hand, I do remember being a seventeen year old girl, teased (if not quite bullied) at school. I remember being the kind happier in the library than on the hockey field. I remember studying English Lit along with the modern languages and hoping I'd do enough to get into university. I was never Cambridge material and I didn't keep a diary – but I did write a lot of letters at that age, and I did have holiday romances so some of those letters would have been embarrassing love letters although to be fair they were to real people. Therein lies my problem with Paradise Girl. I simply do not believe in the central character. For a book focussed entirely on one character's experience that's a big problem.
Kerryl is smart. She's 17. She's been offered a place a Cambridge. But for all her ability to quote Milton and Auerbach and Browning and Keats and Marvel…she comes across like a 14-year-old who has just discovered that boys are hot and fit and might have an awesome six-pack. She is told that she's good at descriptive writing, but there's no evidence of it in her diary. She thinks she's alone now, she's using her diary to record what is important, and there is one scene where it becomes clear that one of her reasons for wanting to live is the beauty of the moor…but there's no passion or romance in any of her talk of it. This is a girl steeped in the moors. She'd either be redolent with the Brontës, Plath and Hughes, or she'd be esteeming Yorkshire's answer to Gilbert White, Frank Elgee. She'd be full of the thrill of the romance of the place, or watching it closely.
Or, because she's been brought up on the farm, she'd be hard-bitten by the reality of it. She might well believe in the Hob and the Bridestones, because it's safer than not believing, but she'd be more practical about the hardships. When the world starts falling apart, she wouldn't be throwing food away, even if she didn't fancy it right now.
Given that she's the one who's shown an interest in the farm, has got up at dawn to do her share of the chores, she'd know more about the technicalities than she seems to – though to be fair – cack-handed as she is, she makes a reasonable fist of it.
It's the Bridget-Jones-girly-ness of her that rings so false. She wouldn't dress up to go into town for supplies. She probably wouldn't even own the kind of underwear that comes into play. She can drive a tractor, can (probably) fire a gun, but baulks at having to wring a hen's neck or remove its innards? I can see that there's a thread of plot which might be used to explain the inconsistencies…but it's not played strongly enough…if these things are out of character, they're not shown to be so…and if I understand the plot properly they should be.
All the same, it is the plot that holds it together. The use of language is out of place with the characterisation and there is no sense of place, but other than a wobble in the middle that had me scribbling What? Really? the plot will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens.
On balance, it's a really good story, not very well told. I think it might sell better as a TV screen play than as novel.
If dystopian fiction is your keep-me-awake cup-of-tea, then we can recommend Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun
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You can read more book reviews or buy Paradise Girl by Phill Featherstone at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Paradise Girl by Phill Featherstone at Amazon.com.
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