Winchelsea

Reviews

Strawberry

As the story continues there are sone interesting revelations and I found myself gripped in the story and the adventure Goody and her brother go on. Goody Brown was rescued from a river when she was just a baby and brought up by her father, the local doctor and cellarman who helps smugglers move their goods through the cellars under the town of Winchelsea. I do know this was to add to the feeling of the olden days language that is used in the book, but even my online dictionary occasionally couldn’t find a word that’s used in the book and if reading this be prepared for some purple prose and the odd word here and there that you may not know if you don’t read a lot of books using more flowery/archaic language.

As we get to know more about the smugglers and Goody gets more involved with the Hawkhurst Gang we find out more about the dark side of smugglers and on the whole I really did enjoy getting into the excitement and adventure in this story. Sixteen year old Goody knew about the work her father did helping smugglers to move their goods underground in the tunnels that run under the town, but it isn’t until she enlists her brother’s help and soon gets involved with a smuggling gang that she begins to discover just exactly what her father was truly involved in. However the story did start to feel a bit weird and I have to admit to almost giving up on reading it by the time I was half way through due to the events that happened making me dislike the main character a lot and what was happening.

While this book has a great ending and is gripping in many places, I did at times find it quite dark in ways I wasn’t expecting. There are some very dark moments in this book, as I said there is the (sort of) incest and some sex, assault, and some uses of the f and s swear words as well as some violence as well.

I found myself really getting into this story despite some of the more complex language used in the prose. Goody is a complex character, feeling far more at home dressed in men’s clothes than in women’s, and I like how this progresses in her story and how she later appears in the latter parts of the book. This is an interesting historical fiction which I have mixed feeling about. While I was prepared for some of the darker things that were happening, some parts of this book made me really dislike the main character at the midway point and I felt like putting this book down and not finishing it.

The language in the prose is interesting and really paints a picture of the landscape well and what is happening, but I have to say even though I’m not stupid, there were so many new words I’d never read before that I did find myself using an online dictionary more than once to look up a word that I didn’t know. There is a last letter at the very end of the book which wraps up what happened after the events, an epilogue, and I just love how this book ends up finishing with things resolved and I found myself completely loving the book’s ending, despite the dark and difficult time I had at some point in the middle of reading this.

-Thanks to Canongate Books for a free copy. The story progresses towards a final and brilliant battle and this last part/book of the story I especially enjoyed!