Ratings3
Average rating4.3
A modern reimagining of a classic fairy tale by one of most bewitching, idiosyncratic British writers of the twentieth century. Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without family, she’s recently disentangled herself from a selfish and indifferent boyfriend and a cruel and indifferent mother. But she shares a quality common to Barbara Comyns’s other heroines: a bracingly unsentimental ability to carry on. Before too long, Bella has found not only a job but a vocation; not only a place to live but a home and a makeshift family. As Comyns’s novel progresses, the story echoes and inverts the Brothers Grimm’s macabre tale The Juniper Tree. Will Bella’s hard-won restoration to life and love come at the cost of the happiness of others?
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While I wasn't as charmed by this one as I was by Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, this was very good - Comyns is very good. I read the fairy tale before reading this, just in case (I read this one: https://fairytalez.com/the-juniper-tree/), and I'm glad I did as it did help at points, but I don't think you'd really miss anything if you didn't read the story first; it was more just sort of looking for Easter eggs in the book than anything.
Bella was a bit prickly of a protagonist, always understandably, but it made it hard at times. I wanted more of some of the other characters (Stephen, Mary, Peter), but can't complain about what we did get.