{"id":1427,"date":"2012-05-29T06:18:28","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T06:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1427"},"modified":"2012-10-22T17:15:05","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T17:15:05","slug":"the-colour-of-milk-by-nell-leyshon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1427","title":{"rendered":"The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1429\" title=\"Colour of Milk\" src=\"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Colour-of-Milk-192x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"192\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Colour-of-Milk-192x300.jpg 192w, http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Colour-of-Milk-658x1024.jpg 658w, http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Colour-of-Milk.jpg 1548w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 192px) 100vw, 192px\" \/><strong>Published by Fig Tree 31 May 2012\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>176pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Clarrie Grundy meets Tess Durbeyfield in Nell Leyshon\u2019s latest work of fiction, a novella\/monologue voiced entirely in the lower case by an abused farm girl who has been newly introduced to literacy: \u2018this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand,\u2019 it starts.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the blisters, beatings and endless work, fifteen-year-old Mary, hampered by a twisted leg, is no one\u2019s fool. She speaks as she finds and she finds life at home &#8211; where her father treats all four daughters as well as his wife as indentured labour &#8211; hard.<\/p>\n<p>Later, sent to work as a maid at the village vicarage, Mary\u2019s tasks become, at least initially, a little easier to bear, but her tongue is no less sharp and her vision of Ralph Graham, the vicar\u2019s son with the roving eye, no less beady.<\/p>\n<p>This pithy account of working women\u2019s miserable lot in the 1830s is leavened by glimpses of the tender and comic sides to Mary although there is no real escape from her cramped, ultimately violated situation.<\/p>\n<p>Mary\u2019s is a hard, short road to adulthood. Leyshon\u2019s pastoral cautionary tale may have echoes of other, more classic work in similar terrain, but its economy, simple but elemental powers of evocation and the immediacy of Mary\u2019s voice give it the bright, brief intensity of a buttercup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n<p>Mary\u2019s is a hard, short road to adulthood. Leyshon\u2019s pastoral cautionary tale may have echoes of other, more classic work in similar terrain, but its economy, simple but elemental powers of evocation and the immediacy of Mary\u2019s voice give it the bright, brief intensity of a buttercup.[&#8230;] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1427"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2908,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427\/revisions\/2908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}