Welcome to Litsy!

My 11th from the #booker2023 longlist is surprisingly humble. This search for a lost mother, who stepped out and was never seen again, is a life‘s work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and it‘s her 1st and only novel. It reads like a memoir, and it feels real. It‘s just that deeply thought through. It seems to do everything Hughes wanted it to do. Recommended.

This is very good. It's basically about mourning a parent. Or I guess mourning in general. The writing is lovely.

#BookSpinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

Getting started on this

I liked this character driven story, until the ending. That's when I knew I loved this story. It's a reminder that we never really know what someone else is thinking and feeling, so we should always make the best possible assumptions of others.

When someone takes their life, they don‘t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.

SiĆ¢n Hughes, Pearl

I must admit, I went in making some assumptions that were way off base. With that title ā€“ Pearl ā€“ and the blurb referencing a young girl and her mother, I assumed it was some kind of adaptation or allusion to The Scarlet Letter. If youā€˜re assuming the same, let me disabuse you of that right now and save you a bit of confusion! Full review: https://keepingupwiththepenguins.com/pearl-sian-hughes/

Why is this on the #Booker longlist. It's a fine book, but nothing I have not read before. Novel about the loss of a mother and the impact it has on her daughter. I had to push myself to finish this one. 2.5 šŸŒŸ

#Booker23 08/13
Unfortunately I didn‘t enjoy this book as much as many of you did. What I did like was the setting of the ā€œold houseā€, where a young mother one day walks out, leaving behind her 8 year old daughter and her baby brother.
The book is about the daughter, dealing with the mother who never came back.
It could be so good, but to me it felt a bit as if the author wanted too much, with the poems and the sub-plots. Glad I read it though!

I‘m not usually into non-linear audiobook narratives and I loathe ā€˜suicide as mystery‘ storylines. And yet I really liked this book. It‘s totally not a ā€˜me‘ book, but I really felt like it worked.

Pearl is a story about a lost mother, all the different kinds of grief and the way they manifest over time, and across generations. The narration is non-linear and unreliable in a way that deliberately plays with the concept of the fallibility of memory without being gimmicky or too obscure. It was a story that made me feel so empathetic for all the flawed characters without feeling like trauma-porn. It‘s almost pitch perfect.

With Pearl I met my goal of 150 books for the year. Looking forward to some chunkster reading in the next 4 months.

As for Pearl it is a light pick for me. My 2nd Booker long list about a family devastated by the loss of the wife and mother. Marianne‘s journey through her grief at age 8 is long and difficult. I wanted to feel emotionally connected to the story but instead I felt more on the outside looking in. Definitely could be a me problem

A lovely book. A sad and tender book.
Living through the unresolved disappearance of her mother when she was a child, Marianne seems forever betwixt and between the "old house" and the "new house", unable to fully inhabit either. Her roles of daughter, sister, lover, mother, artist and art therapist are likewise shaped by her grief and the effect it has had on her childhood memories, transforming them to part-remembered, part-imagined experiences.

An absolute gem of a book. Following a young girl into adulthood as she searches for who she is and what life is, following the disappearance of her mother.

Like another Booker Longlister, Western Lane, the empty space where a mother should be looms over this book. But where Gopi grasped at routine and rigidity, Marianne falls to brambles and wandering.

Cont'd...

Chronicles a woman‘s struggle to cope with the childhood trauma of her mother‘s disappearance.

Perhaps this novel is a more focused reading experience in print, but on audio I felt like it meandered without a clear trajectory. That might be intentional as the MC is stuck trying to make sense of the unanswered questions surrounding her mother‘s life and presumed death.

#bookerlonglist Book 3/13

I really liked this and I‘m glad I got to discover it thanks to the Booker as I‘d not heard of it before. It felt very ā€˜English‘, with skipping rhymes at the start of each chapter, and the narrator had a Yorkshire lilt. (Even though the book is set in the Midlands)

It did however feel more like a Women‘s Prize nominee rather than a Booker book. That isn‘t to denigrate either the book or the Women‘s Prize but it‘s ā¬‡ļø