{"id":3729,"date":"2013-03-01T09:27:04","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T09:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3729"},"modified":"2013-03-02T11:53:12","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T11:53:12","slug":"the-first-book-of-calamity-leek-by-paula-lichtarowicz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3729","title":{"rendered":"The First Book of Calamity Leek by Paula Lichtarowicz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Hutchinson 7 February 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

296pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A clutch of young girls are all living under the same shed-like roof, calling each other sisters but with different surnames.\u00a0 Their home is in the Garden, which could be an orphanage, except that it has very high security.\u00a0 Perhaps it is a young offenders\u2019 institution, but the toddlers are too young to have committed crimes. It could be some sort of early-years nunnery, but their chief carer is their grotesque one-eyed, rarely sober Aunty.\u00a0 She keeps them hard at it, tending the roses and the animals and preparing for War.\u00a0 Mother is a distant figure, rarely seen and obsessed with her dead daughter Emily.<\/p>\n

The early chapters of Lichtarowicz\u2019s debut set a tone reminiscent of folk tales.\u00a0 The girls\u2019 formulaic names (Calamity Leek, Mary Bootle, Millie Gatwick), simple lifestyle (headscarves always worn outdoors, washing under a standpipe) and quaint speech patterns (\u2018Happen I don\u2019t…\u2019) all help to create the feeling that the story is set in a mythical world out of both time and place.<\/p>\n

The girls are indoctrinated with a bizarre set of rules as laid down in the Appendix, a ring binder of pages in alphabetical order, with plenty of room for new additions as and when needed.\u00a0 They\u2019re given a jumbled mix of beauty tips (\u2018Egg yolk conditioning is good for greasy hair\u2019), songs from the musicals that gave them their first names (\u2018See that pretty girl in the mirror there\u2019) and their own special creation myth (\u2018She opened up the waste disposal lid and shoved Her Sun out of \u00a0Heaven\u2019).<\/p>\n

However the Garden isn\u2019t Paradise, and trouble is brewing \u2013 in fact it has already reached critical mass, and the story is told by Calamity Leek in a series of flashbacks.<\/p>\n

She is an earnest child who believes everything she is told and yearns for Aunty\u2019s approval, so that the story comes from the unusual perspective of a conformist who looks on the rebels with horror.\u00a0 And gradually time and place is revealed, and the folk story conventions break down.\u00a0 In particular, there are none of the standard magic interventions (beans, good fairy, talking animals).\u00a0 It turns out there is no magic power at work, just human nature: grief, madness, sexuality and youthful rebellion all boiling up towards the crisis.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an engrossing story, deftly told.\u00a0 To be sure there is an elephant in the room, in that the Appendix says nothing about menstruation, and surely the oldest of the girls must have reached physical maturity \u2013 Sandra Saffron Walden oozes with jail-bait sexuality.\u00a0 Similarly it doesn\u2019t do to ask what happens if the girls need the dentist, or how Mother and Aunty fend off inspections by the authorities, but these are quibbles.\u00a0 Suspend your disbelief and you will be rewarded with an enjoyable read.<\/p>\n

The story does have an underlying theme, and is really an extended discussion of the nature of belief.\u00a0 If you start with a young enough child, and school them rigorously enough, can you make them believe anything?\u00a0 Or is questioning belief a basic human behaviour?\u00a0 Folk tales usually have a moral to impart, and while Paula Lichtarowicz refuses to wrench her plot into a heavy-handed didactic ending, the clues are there.\u00a0 As G.K. Chesterton said, ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing \u2014 they believe in anything.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/p>\n

Calamity is an earnest child who believes everything she is told and yearns for Aunty\u2019s approval, so that the story comes from the unusual perspective of a conformist who looks on the rebels with horror. And gradually time and place is revealed, and the folk story conventions break down. In particular, there are none of the standard magic interventions (beans, good fairy, talking animals). It turns out there is no magic power at work, just human nature: grief, madness, sexuality and youthful rebellion all boiling up towards the crisis.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3729","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\/3729","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=3729"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3878,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3729\/revisions\/3878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}