Gwenni is a twelve-year-old girl with wool socks soaked from running across the damp Welsh meadows and wide green eyes that interpret with absolute innocence the events surrounding her. That innocence is almost a veil—it softens reality, transforms it, justifies it in her mind, as it does for most children, often as a defense, often because they cannot yet conceive of evil. It is their way of reading the world around them, the only way that lets them focus on a single detail and explain it without grasping its deeper meanings, sometimes terrible and unbearable.
Gwenni loves to read and write stories. She is convinced she can fly and that she must rescue the soul of the fur fox. She fears neither the village madman nor the graveyard tombs. She cares nothing for boys or full skirts; some call her an odd child. Each time the word cuts through the room, her mother flinches—unable to see Gwenni's innocence, she sees only the looming specter of mental illness that grips her own mind, latently, and once drove her own mother to suicide. So it takes only certain events—emotionally charged ones that shatter daily routine—to make reality unbearable and to trigger a progressively worsening spiral that unleashes her mother's illness in all its violence.
The novel gently captures a time of transition, both literal and figurative: Gwenni's passage from innocence into puberty, from the age of secrets into the age of truth—a truth that has always lurked in the background but slowly reveals itself before her eyes.
The author has a remarkable gift for calmly drawing a family portrait, probably far more common than we usually stop to consider—one in which children born into families living with mental illness become almost inured to daily alarming behaviors (stares, jerks, fits of temper, violent words) and the routines of treatment (imposed silences, rest periods, absences, pills). Yet none of this eases the immense pain they must carry, often unable to name it.
Valeria Mastroiacovo, 2009