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Flamingo: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022, an exquisite novel of kindness and hope

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Interesting choice, and I’m so glad that this was on the Womens Prize longlist because I wouldn’t have even heard of this one otherwise. It was a story that really got to me, and even after I had finished it I was still thinking about the characters. Their doorbell plays the tune of I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, they engage in food fights, they drink tea in mugs which say "the sloth is my spirit animal", they have flamingos on their front lawn and the list continues. Kurze, abgehackt klingende Sätze, die nicht zu mir gesprochen haben, haben mich wirklich abgeschreckt.

Essentially what I am saying here is that the book lacked any organic feeling growth, which was a real shame. Characters who play large roles are forgotten about in other timelines, and relationships develop up to certain points only to be abandoned. Obdachlos geht er seiner Arbeit als Maler und Lackierer nicht mehr nach und verbringt seine Tage mit einem Porzellanschaf unter freiem Himmel.Following Daniel and Eve, Mother and Son who move next door to Leslie and Sherry and their Daughters Pauline And Rae Flamingo is a story of how two families become interwoven, how they become so close they be default become family. It’s the view from the window, gentle and forgiving, saying something now about the wider world, all the lives being lived, the mistakes being made, but there are fields and flowers and ancient trees, there are badgers and butterflies, and there is nothing as fertile as foolishness, and there is always the tender sky. Because ultimately this is a book which believes that love (in all its forms) is more important than political crisis or art, and which explores the generational impacts when it is neglected. Daniel is desperate to uncover the truth behind it all, but in doing so he has to revisit his past childhood. He is the author/illustrator of 12 books for children, ranging from the Mousehunter trilogy, The Mythical 9th Division series as well as Pigsticks and Harold's four adventures.

There are elements of how challenging it is running a business with a bits of Fawlty towers humour thrown in. In 2022, she co-won the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry, was a winner in the Poetry Society Member’s Competition, won first and second prize in the Second Light Poetry Competition, came second in the York Poetry Prize, been commended in both the Hippocrates Prize for Medicine and Poetry and the Verve Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and her pamphlet manuscript was highly commended in the 2021 and 2022 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition. When the plot did start to pick up, I got into it, only to be let down with a largely unresolved ending. But the unspoken element is Eve (now a professor in Edinburgh and New York, where she has moved with her wife) – a breach between her and Daniel which has moved to something of a chasm after a recent revelation – is painful, particularly for Sherry and Rea – and as Rea and Daniel begin a tentative, still platonic but deeply felt relationship, the family look to help understand and resolve this breach.What a like about the book is that it not only tells the adventures of a running a hotel, but also deals with different themes. Interestingly and for reasons not really clear to me the place descriptions in the UK – which also include the Norfolk coast, Derbyshire and Pembrokeshire – appear to be completely generic. I had such high hopes for the book, I loved the premise, I loved the switching in timelines, I loved the idea of the characters but it fell flat for me. It took a long time to get into it, a number of times I questioned whether I should keep persevering.

For some reason, I read the title poem, the final one in Kathryn Bevis’ debut pamphlet, first, then went backwards from there. Inspired by our illustrated books, Frederick the Fox and Maximus the Mouse, our new animal alphabet prints bring the magic to the walls of your home. This is a story about family, secrets, desire and duty, as well as a sensitive portrayal of the realities of homelessness and mental health. By the end of the collection… I was in floods of tears, and convinced that this is the most accomplished and emotionally significant group of new poems I have read in a very long time. Hazy, soft focus, world obscured until something makes you look again, look closely, or see in a way you’ve never seen before.This funny, charming story is the perfect way to introduce young children to being brave, and help them find ways to overcome their fears. I love the way her stories are populated by characters who don’t quite seem to neatly fit into the mainstream. But there's a lot to get done, and it's not easy to manage the needs of the penguins when there's a heatwave on and a huge ice shortage. I thought it would be a contemporary novel (which maybe it is) but the writing is unique and captures the characters internal monologues beautifully with some really interesting observations about humanity along the way. Told over two central time periods, this is certainly a novel that grabs one’s attention from the start.

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