Book Reviews March

Sacred Hearts
By Sarah Dynant
published by Virage £7.99
The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God’s protection, but any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. The arrival of Santa Caterina’s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core.
Ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen-year-old Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant, young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl’s cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will never have.
Sarah Dunant, the bestselling author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, brings this intricate Renaissance world compellingly to life. Amid Sacred Hearts is a rich, engrossing, multifaceted love story, encompassing the passions of the flesh, the exultation of the spirit, and the deep, enduring power of friendship.
The Lovely Bones
By Alice Sebold
Published by Picador £7.99
This is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting. This is a novel which finds light in even the darkest of places. My name was Salmon; like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on 6th December 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighbourhood. My mother liked his border flowers and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven, which looks a lot like her school playground, where everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it, except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on Earth. Watching from here, Susie sees her happy suburban family devastated by her death, isolated, even from one another, as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet. A compelling read, once picked up you won’t want to put it down.
Blacklands
By Belinda Baker
Published by Congi £7.99
Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb digs holes on Exmoor, hoping to find a body. Every day after school, while his classmates swap football stickers, Steven goes digging to lay to rest the ghost of the uncle he never knew, who disappeared aged eleven and is assumed to have fallen victim to the notorious serial killer Arnold Avery. Only Steven’s Nan is not convinced her son is dead. She still waits for him to come home, standing bitter guard at the front window while her family fragments around her. Steven is determined to heal the widening cracks between them before it’s too late, and if that means presenting his grandmother with the bones of her murdered son, he’ll do it. So the boy takes the next logical step, carefully crafting a letter to Arnold Avery in prison. And there begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a desperate child and a bored serial killer. A game that will have more terrifying consequences than Steven could ever imagine…
How Could She
By Dana Fowley
Published by Arrow £6.99
“How Could She?” is the moving story of one young woman’s desperate struggle to survive and overcome years of horrific abuse. At just five years old, Dana learned that there was no one she could trust. Most devastating of all, even her own mother betrayed her and in the most unimaginable way. For years, Dana and her younger sister suffered at the hands of one of Britain’s largest ever-known paedophile rings, and their mother did nothing to protect them. Only now is Dana’s nightmare coming to an end as she crusades to put her abusers behind bars. In June 2007, the truth was finally exposed. Dana bravely testified against her own mother. The woman who had subjected Dana and her sister to a lifetime of horror was sentenced to twelve years in prison. It was one of the most traumatic ordeals Dana has ever experienced, but a shocked world was finally forced to open its eyes to what happened to Dana. This is her story of survival.