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    Reasons She Goes to the Woods: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014
    Reasons She Goes to the Woods: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014
    Reasons She Goes to the Woods: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014
    Ebook253 pages2 hours

    Reasons She Goes to the Woods: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014

    By Deborah Kay Davies

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    'Exquisite... To be marvelled at.' Guardian

    Shortlisted for the Encore Award

    Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

    Pearl can be very, very good. More often she is very, very bad. But she’s just a child, a mystery to all who know her. A little girl who has her own secret reasons for escaping to the nearby woods. What might those reasons be? And how can she feel so at home in the dark, sinister, sensual woods, a wonder of secrets and mystery?

    Told in vignettes across Pearl’s childhood years, Reasons She Goes to the Woods is a nervy but lyrical novel about a normal girl growing up, doing the normal things little girls do.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOneworld Publications
    Release dateFeb 6, 2014
    ISBN9781780743776
    Reasons She Goes to the Woods: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014
    Author

    Deborah Kay Davies

    Deborah Kay Davies started writing and publishing when she was a mature student and taught creative writing at Cardiff University. Her first collection of stories, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Award. She has also published a collection of poems, Things You Think I Don’t Know, and the novel True Things About Me. She lives in Wales.

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    Reviews for Reasons She Goes to the Woods

    3.5/5

    26 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Deborah Kay Davies is one of those writers who does dark brilliantly. Her first novel 'True Things About Me' was disturbing yet unputdownable – about a thrill-seeking young woman who gets into an abusive relationship. Her second novel, the Baileys longlisted 'Reasons She Goes to the Woods' is also disturbing and unputdownable…It’s about a child, Pearl, and her family. There’s her little brother The Blob, there’s her mother and her beloved Daddy. The book’s blurb quotes from the nursery rhyme There was a little girl, (which was actually written by Longfellow, I found out!). "When she was good, She was very, very good, And when she was bad she was horrid." Except that Pearl is more often horrid than good. She’s an experimenter on other people – when she gets found out, they don’t like it – especially her mother who punishes her. She hides in the woods behind their house. It soon becomes clear that the mother has mental health problems, and Pearl gets blamed, and as she grows up and becomes a teenager, her experiments get nastier, and her mother carries on getting worse. Her poor beloved Daddy is beside himself with worry.Some might say that the outcome of the novel is predictable given Pearl’s seeming single-mindedness in her actions; the route to get there though is not so obvious and builds up gradually over the course of the book. The author, tells the story with a great deal of style. Although the book is nominally 250 pages long, only half the pages contain the story. Each pair of pages contains a one or two word heading on the left, and then a single paragraph that fills the page on the right. So the book is only really about 120 pages long. Each right hand page is a vignette recounting one snapshot of Pearl’s life, moving from primary school through to teenage years. The extract below is the last third of the first of these little stories that make up the whole:"The living room is quiet. In the entire world there is only Pearl and her father. Her mother laid a fire before she went out; taking ages, leaving instructions, dropping things, then slamming the door and coming back. Now Pearl listens to the sounds coming from the grate as the flames lick each other and purr. From the place pressed against her father’s knee she feels a rippling sensation move through her body, as if a delicate, frilled mushroom were expanding, elongating, filling her up. She exhales slowly. She mustn’t disturb him. He would push her off with his beautiful hands if he woke up."Told in the present tense, there is a dreamy otherworldliness about Pearl’s actions that belies the fact that a lot of what she does is downright nasty. It’s clear that the mother-daughter relationship never happened and that she idolises her father. She also has a controlling relationship with her few friends, and The Blob too of course. After all, Pearl only wants one thing …Deborah Kay Davies has again probed the dark side of relationships – different ones this time. I wonder where she’ll go for her next novel? As I said at the top, this book is disturbing and unputdownable, an uneasy but thought-provoking read. (8.5/10)
    • 3/5
      There is no doubt that this is a triumph of format; in 124 vignettes Pearl grows from an odd infant being rather casually raised in a household touched by both poverty and insanity, to a dangerous young woman. The years slip by seamlessly marked by the seasons or by rites of passage (Pearl goes to the beach, Pearl has her period) but Pearl remains fixed on one goal to the exclusion of everything elseSo stylistically this works - but I am not sure that it does as a story. Its a long time since I have been either child or teenager, but the power Pearl appears to hold over her female friends and her gang is hard to understand. Surely, at some point someone realises that its more fun and eminently safer, to leave Pearl at home. At some point her adored, but obviously rather dopey father, would have discovered her stratagems against her mother. At some point, someone is calling family servicesSo its engagingly written, but more admirable for how its written than what it says
    • 2/5
      I really did expect more from this book. I read it in a few sittings and sadly I wasn't that impressed with it. To be honest, it was really quite disturbing...and I really don't think it was my cup of tea at all, which is a real shame as I thought it initially had some promise.
      One of the laziest endings too.
      It's a no from me.

    Book preview

    Reasons She Goes to the Woods - Deborah Kay Davies

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