Cover: Helen Crawford-White
Lucy Strange is rapidly consolidating her reputation as a fine writer for older children/younger teens (and upwards) and her latest book is again outstanding. I both admire and enjoy her work enormously.
For a start she is a consummate storyteller. Her novels, usually with a period setting, have a distinctive originality and eschew sensational action adventure in favour of the sensitive exploration of character and family relationships. They are nevertheless compelling narratives crafted with consummate skill to hold readers’ emotions in thrall alongside their eagerness to know how things will resolve.
It delights me that Lucy Strange is very much her own writer. She does not capitulate to the latest trends in children’s publishing and never churns out the same old characters and storylines with only minor variations. Rather she roots her stories very much in some of the best traditions of children’s fiction, exploiting different specific places together with their folklore and superstitions.
Sisters of the Lost Marsb is a wonderful example of all of this. In her previous book, Lucy Strange drew effectively on the landscape of The Lake District. This time it is the area of Romney Marsh which gives the story its very atmospheric grounding. Set in a rural past, the narrative is seeded with enough dialect to give it a feeling of authenticity, without making it hard to read, and her story is steeped in the folklore and superstition of the area as much as in the salty waters of the pervasive marshland.
With a cursed family of six daughters, a cruel father, a sister ‘sold’ in exchange for a horse, a travelling fair, infections with marsh fever and suspicions of witchcraft, this novel bursts with the trials and traumas of our rural past. It might almost be thought of as ‘Thomas Hardy Light’, a deep, dark tale of family loyalty and conflict in an England as was, or at least might have been. Yet from these rich, deep roots, Lucy Strange grows her own new narrative of spreading branches and mesmerising foliage. It evokes the past with new vividness and compelling involvement.
