“It’s quarter to midnight. I’m standing in the rain outside my next-door neighbor’s house, gripping his rusted railings with cold, wet hands, staring down through them at the misshapen and perilously narrow stone steps leading to his converted basement, from which noise is blaring. It’s my least favorite song in the world: Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 13, 2014)

In Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir, forty-one year old Louise Beeston may be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Her creepy next-door neighbor, Justin Clay, plays loud music late at night, usually every other weekend. Although Louise has repeatedly implored him to stop, Clay is indifferent to her pleas. (Louise’s husband, Stuart, is oblivious to the cacophony. Even if a freight train were to pass through their bedroom, Stuart would remain asleep.) Unfortunately, Louise has little hope that Clay, a pot-smoking party animal who enjoys living it up with his loud-mouthed friends, will change his ways.

Adding to her distress is Stuart’s plan to sandblast the exterior of their sooty Cambridge home. The workman her husband hired plans to cover and seal their windows, leaving them without natural light for at least three weeks. In addition, the sandblasting will kick up a great deal of dust. All this would be bearable if Louise’s only child, seven-year-old son, Joseph, were living with them. Instead, he is a junior probationer boarding at Saviour College School, an elite educational institution that trains promising youngsters to sing religious choral music. Although Louise and Stuart see their son regularly, Joseph spends most of his time away from home. Louise hates this arrangement; she misses Joseph terribly. Stuart, on the other hand, argues that their child is happy and thriving, and should remain where he is.

As Louise narrates her tale of woe, we gradually start to wonder if she is completely sane. She admits that she is sleep-deprived, irritable, and resentful. Louise and her husband quarrel frequently and she soon becomes too distraught to go to work. Moreover, she is having troubling visions: She sees and hears a choir of children similar to her son’s, except that this group includes girls. Is Louise hallucinating? Or does this “visitation” have a deeper meaning?

The Orphan Choir is relatively brief, yet extremely vivid and powerful. The author is clever but not self-consciously so, and she uses foreshadowing skillfully to hint that everything is not as it seems. Hannah’s hard-hitting dialogue, adept use of setting, and wonderful feel for language add to the novel’s potency. We sympathize with the exhausted, frustrated, and high-strung heroine, and hope that she will somehow find the peace of mind she craves. Leave it to the talented and creative Sophie Hannah to spring some big surprises at the conclusion of this engrossing and eerie psychological thriller; the riveting finale will knock your socks off.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Lie Down

Bibliography:

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets : Stories (2008)
• The Orphan Choir (January 2014)

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

• Little Face (2006)
• The Wrong Mother (2008 UK; 2009 US) ( Published as The Point of Rescue) in the UK
• The Dead Lie Down (2009 UK; 2010 US) (Published as The Other Half Livesin the UK)
• The Truth Teller’s Lie (2010 UK; 2010 US) (Published as Hurting Distance in the UK)
• The Cradle in the Grave (2011) (Published as A Room Swept White in the UK)
• The Other Woman’s House (2012)  (Published as Lasting Damage in the UK)
• Kind of Cruel (2013)
• The Carrier (2014 in UK)

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.

“There are things that I learned to do after coming to Wyalkatchem… how to hang a blanket in the boughs of a gum tree and rock a baby to sleep, how to sit quietly at night with a child in my lap, how to feel for a fever, how to boil willow for its cooling sap, how to paint a throat with gentian violet and listen for the smallest breath, how to make a coffin, how to line it with pieces of cotton, how to dress a dead child, how to lower a coffin into the ground, how to put one foot in front of the other and keep on doing it every day.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 22, 2011)

It’s a tough world that’s inhabited by Gin Boyle Toad – an albino, a classical pianist, an unloved woman whose life has been reduced to freak show status with the indelicate stares, the gossip, the pointing. Although she was raised in Perth’s wealthy environs and showed early and sustained musical talent, she is abused and ultimately institutionalized by her cruel and loathsome stepfather.

Her unlikely rescuer is Agrippas Toad, a dwarfish and crudely mannered farmer who happens to hear her play piano and immediately marries her. By doing so, he attempts to stave off the rumors about behavior that is deemed aberrant in his small-minded farm community. It is the “strangeness” of these two that binds them together. Gin Boyle reflects, “It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t love. But it had been tolerable, so long as there was nothing else.”

Into these unfulfilled lives come two Italian prisoners of war – Antonio and John – part of a wave of 18,000 Italian prisoners of war who were sent to work on isolated Australian farms between 1941 and 1947. The very pregnant and unloved Gin forms a dangerous affinity for Antonio, a shoemaker by trade, who gives her the attention and compassion that is missing from her marriage. In the meantime, Toad is more intrigued by John, for reasons that eventually become evident.

Gin Boyle – aching from the death of her oldest daughter, Joan, also an albino…scarred from years of feeling like a freak…embarrassed that her life has become circumvented in an ugly small town with a small husband who has an obsession with lady’s corsets…feels the stirring of love under Antonio’s appreciative gazes and through his words. But is it real and can it last?

There are some very real strengths in Goldie Goldbloom’s debut book. The prose often soars to lyricism and the description of the landscape is positively breathtaking. In fact, the harsh and unforgiving Australian outback becomes a character in its own right, and the occasional foray of violence – the hunting of the rabbits, the capricious weather, the lopping off of sheep’s tails – is a fine metaphor for the wartime world. In addition, the book presents some meaningful and compelling themes: what “home” really means, the subtle violence of displacement, and how so many of us are prisoners, either literally or metaphorically, either behind bars or within our own skin.

Is it a perfect book? Well, no. Goldie Goldbloom sometimes doesn’t trust her reader quite enough and drums home certain messages: “You are a stone fortress, not a person. When you opened your gates, it was not to surrender to me, but to capture me.” Or, in response to why Gin didn’t lock up her Italian captives, “They’re men. Not animals.” The build-up relating to Joan ends up being undeveloped and here and there, there’s some melodrama.

But even with those fault lines, this is still an imaginative and stunningly original debut, with characters that will remain seared into your memory. Her mesmerizing tale demands to be read and to be appreciated. The book was originally called “Toad’s Museum of Freaks and Wonders” and has been retitled for its U.S. publication.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Goldie Goldbloom
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

Bibliography:

• The Paperbark Shoe (2010; March 2011)