What I'm Reading

The Earth Hums in B flat by Mari Strachan

Gwenni Morgan can fly, in her sleep at least. With enough practice perhaps she will fly while awake. This is the story of her town, her family and the secrets that everyone knows, but no one talks about. Gwenni wants to be a detective and she will leave nothing be, until she can make sense of it. She wants to discover the whereabouts of Ifan Evans, the missing shepherd, and what's "dolally" mean and why did her grandmother go "dolally", and is Gwenni odd, as her mother says, and will she go dolally? And why is her best friend Alwenna, suddenly interested in boys? There is always a lot for children to learn, and the best part of a coming of age novel is the rediscovery of our own emergence from childhood and the first understandings of an adult world that makes little sense to the straightforward mind of a precocious child.

A small cast of characters keeps the town knit together. There is Gwenni and her Nain (grandmother) and Tada (father) and Mam and her sister Bethan, all of whom will also be caught up in the consequences of spilled secrets. Elin the teacher, is married to the lost man Ifan, and Nanw Lipstick is the gossip who knows everything and tells everything. Alwenna, Gwenni's best friend, cannot remain so, and must grow as well.

Told through Gwenni's voice, the story unfolds slowly through both a plot moving towards a conclusion, and through the slow and changing descriptions of the people and town as Gwenni sees them. The writing is straightforward and provides a nice foil to the matter-of-fact belief Gwenni has in spirits and in flying. The reader catches the warmth that Gwenni fells for her family and begins to feel the same. Every character is deserving of sympathy, while each portrait is unsentimental and evokes that period in childhood when the world opens up whether we are ready or not. This is a first novel, by Welsh librarian Mari Strachan, that succeeds admirably. Well worth a reading.