Here is our Blue Moon rising over the ocean - from last week. So lovely - and not in the least blue - though the sky was. The tenuous link to this blog is that it is only once in a blue moon that I have a new book out, and get a review. So here below is my first review, from a real writer too - Penny Frances. I am so glad she enjoyed the book, and very grateful she took time to say so!
She says. of Umbrellas:
An intriguing collection of stories ranging in length from the flash fiction Talky Tin to the previously published novella Till They Dropped. All written in a wonderfully disconcerting, often surreal, deadpan style that belies sinister undercurrents.
From the beautifully understated study of lonely women of a certain age enticed into the title story's Umbrellas of Hamelin, through the equally lonely inhabitants of Disraeli Crescent where even their dreams are mundane and clichéd; the wonderfully incisive if gentle satire of the illogicality of ex-pat casual racism in The Martian Goes to a Party... (author's apology not necessary!); to the much longer disturbingly surreal Rainy Day House where the protagonist is enticed to sleep and dream her way through the seasons, leaving us to doubt the future she draws for herself, her partner and unborn baby, Sue Knight leaves the reader with a disturbing sense of the disconnect between what is said and what is actually happening. Klook and Plukey, the least surreal of all the stories, also features a classically unreliable narrator in Anita/Kate, the self-acclaimed star of the class of 1966, who seeks to confirm her superiority while interviewing her former classmates 30 years later, and finds her self-image start to unravel through the insights of Klook, her teenage nemesis.
Till They Dropped completes the selection with its nightmare dystopian and totally surreal vision of being trapped in a self-perpetuating, all encompassing yet rapidly disintegrating consumer world of the Mechanism from which there is seemingly no escape.
A highly original collection, complete with author's notes along the way and well worth the read.
From the beautifully understated study of lonely women of a certain age enticed into the title story's Umbrellas of Hamelin, through the equally lonely inhabitants of Disraeli Crescent where even their dreams are mundane and clichéd; the wonderfully incisive if gentle satire of the illogicality of ex-pat casual racism in The Martian Goes to a Party... (author's apology not necessary!); to the much longer disturbingly surreal Rainy Day House where the protagonist is enticed to sleep and dream her way through the seasons, leaving us to doubt the future she draws for herself, her partner and unborn baby, Sue Knight leaves the reader with a disturbing sense of the disconnect between what is said and what is actually happening. Klook and Plukey, the least surreal of all the stories, also features a classically unreliable narrator in Anita/Kate, the self-acclaimed star of the class of 1966, who seeks to confirm her superiority while interviewing her former classmates 30 years later, and finds her self-image start to unravel through the insights of Klook, her teenage nemesis.
Till They Dropped completes the selection with its nightmare dystopian and totally surreal vision of being trapped in a self-perpetuating, all encompassing yet rapidly disintegrating consumer world of the Mechanism from which there is seemingly no escape.
A highly original collection, complete with author's notes along the way and well worth the read.
I hope it is funny too, and will make you want to keep turning the page. The last story Till They Dropped (as in "They shopped till they dropped") - the world as a giant shopping mall run by AI machines - was written before I had begun my Bible Study with the Jehovah's Witnesses who called. At that time I did not know of God's promise, recorded in Revelation, that He will "bring to ruin those ruining the earth" - even though I had had an intensive religious education.
But at least I saw that the way we were going we would ruin it, and that no human solutions to our problems had worked. What I did not know then, and am so grateful to know now, is that we, the children of Adam, are not abandoned to this. And I do keep trying to pass that wonderful news on to others.
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