Monday

May 2017 Book Choice

Our May 2017 book choice was The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
Here is part of the 2015 book review from the Guardian writer Celeste Ng 

Image result for girl in the red coatKate Hamer’s debut novel has the trappings of a thriller. Sensitive eight-year-old Carmel –the red-coated girl of the title – is spirited away by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. As Beth, her mother, desperately searches for her, Carmel realises that her kidnapper has not taken her at random: he believes she has a special gift. Told in the alternating perspectives of the grieving mother and the missing daughter, it keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip.
Image result for girl in the red coat
It’s no accident that the title calls to mind Little Red Riding Hood, the ultimate story of a young girl captured by a predator. Carmel is abducted from a storytelling festival, and both she and her mother make frequent reference to the fairytale nature of what’s happened. Beth wishes she’d kept her daughter “shut away in a fortress or a tower. Locked with a golden key that I would swallow.” Spotting her shadow on the wall beside her captor’s, Carmel muses: “We both look like the paper puppets … and I wonder what story we’d be telling if we were.” She steels herself by thinking: “Sometimes, it’s easier to think of things as stories … If I made these things into stories I could float away from them, and look at them sideways, or like they were happening inside a snow globe.”

Jeannie hosted the dinner party 






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