Judith Clarke

William is a tall, knobbly, introverted teenager. On his way home from school one afternoon, he observes a beautiful blonde long-haired girl seated on a park bench. She’s reading a thin book, which has to be poetry. William is smitten, and, keeping his distance, he follows her home. Every day after school for the next three weeks, he stands across the road from the girl's house, gazing up at her window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. His model for chaste, idealized love is the poet Petrarch, who saw his muse, Laura, only once. Apparently that was enough for a lifetime. Daz, William’s exuberant younger sister, urges him to “get real”, do some detective work, find out who the mystery girl is, and meet her. Little does William know, the girl, Karen Leonard, is an athletic sort, and she was reading a netball guide, not poetry. A sign on her bedroom door reads “Nuke ’em with Netball,” and her walls are plastered with sports posters.

Daz is as far away from “getting real” as her brother. She’s heard a rumour about a fellow high-school student, the striking, blond-haired, Greek-god-of a boy, Valentine O’Leary—whom most know to be an obnoxious, narcissistic cad, who goes through girls at breakneck speed, tossing each away after a single use. The story is that Valentine did something wonderfully thoughtful, profoundly kind, and achingly tender to please his mother. Daz is so moved by the story that she’s revised her former prejudice and fallen in love with him. Valentine has hidden depths! Problem is: he has no idea who she is. When he catches her looking at him in geography class, however, he can’t resist giving her the Valentine “Special”, the intense vulnerable look he regularly practises at the bathroom mirror. Daz will come to her senses when she sees how horrified both her brother and her friend are upon learning who the object of her passion actually is. Her friend Joanna tells her the story about Valentine has no basis in reality. It was concocted by a humiliated girl who knew just how much it would get his goat.

The third significant character in Clarke’s short novel is William and Daz’s grandmother, seventy-nine-year-old Sheila Thredlow, who lives in Sunset Rest Home. She too suffers delusions, but hers are due to dementia. Clarke brilliantly creates Mrs. Thredlow’s cognitive impairment. At times the elderly woman’s confused notions and her exchanges with another of the residents of the old folks home add humour to the story, but her condition is so delicately rendered that there is much poignancy as well. Mrs. Thredlow may not know anything about where she is and how she got there, but she does remember her beloved brother, Viv, killed in World War II, and the “friend of her heart”, Bonnie Lewis, who had loved Viv dearly. Sadly, before his death, Viv had been so busy pursuing his ideal girl—the “wrong type”—that he failed to recognize Bonnie’s feelings for him. Now, in old age, Mrs. Thredlow seems to be in distress about the friend of her heart. Her granddaughter is determined to do some detective work to find Bonnie.

Through her characters, especially Mrs. Sheila Thredlow, Clarke suggests that it is the friends of our heart that stay with us. In obsessively focussing on our delusional “ideal”, we may be missing out on the life-enriching love that is available to us.

I’m afraid that this book, given its age (it was first published in 1994) and its thin plot, may not engage many in its target young adult audience, but I enjoyed it immensely.… (mer)

After a summer tragedy that none of them wish to speak of, the Sinclair family has moved away from their lovely home by the sea to a sober grey-brick house situated in a remote, densely forested part of the Blue Hills. There are three children. Clem, at 17, is the eldest. He spends his days in the garden speaking to a mysterious new friend, Amy, who wears a strange old-fashioned school uniform and who declines to come into the house. Clem can’t seem to settle in at the new place; boxes of his things sit unpacked in his room. There are strange gaps in his memory, and he can’t recall what caused his mother to break down and be hospitalized. He thinks it must’ve been her stressful work as a teacher. He would like to apologize for not listening to her when she may have needed him to. She has now lain in bed for months, mute and inaccessible, tended to by a kind local woman, Mrs. Mack.

Clem’s sisters aren’t doing any better than he is. Jessie, 10, cannot get used to the new house, but more worrying than that is the behaviour of her older sister. Vida, 14, has been behaving strangely: she’s volatile, even abusive, and Jess spends most hours of the day attempting to placate her. Like their father and Mrs. Mack, Jess is troubled by the older girl’s intense interest in folklore—ill-willed fairy folk and changelings, spells and incantations. Vida has become highly superstitious and insists on performing tasks in an exacting, ordered manner to ward off bad luck; however, it’s Vida’s determination to make contact with the dead that is most alarming. She compels Jess to attend a séance with her in the nearby village, and Vida believes the next step is for the two of them to lay hands on a special planchette designed to receive written messages from those who have passed on. Jess is frightened of dabbling in the occult—even more so, when she catches glimpses of a shimmering ghostly girl. Jess worries that the ghost’s intentions are malevolent, that this spirit girl wants to take her sister away. It takes a while to find out what is fuelling Vida’s desire to speak with the dead and why she believes her actions caused her mother’s breakdown.

Clarke’s is an absorbing novel, skillfully and sensitively written, and at times it’s also quite suspenseful. One reads first to understand what the tragedy is that no one in the family can speak about directly, but also to find out who Clem’s mysterious friend is, the identity and intent of the ghost, why Vida is consumed with guilt, and finally to see if the children’s mother and the family as a whole will recover.

I was impressed with this novel, as I have been with many from Clarke. I was saddened to learn that she died in 2020. I hope that her quality fiction for young people will live on.… (mer)