The Clay Girl – Heather Tucker
This novel was highly recommended by several people on booktube that I had to read it.
Here is the blurb …
Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had unravelled many times before. This time it explodes.
Eight-year-old Hariet, known to all as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls . . . With Ari on the journey is her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. But when they arrive in Pleasant Cove, they instead find refuge with Mary and her partner Nia.
As the tumultuous ’60s ramp up in Toronto, Ari is torn from her aunts and forced back to her twisted mother and fractured sisters. Her new stepfather Len and his family offer hope, but as Ari grows to adore them, she’s severed violently from them too, when her mother moves in with the brutal Dick Irwin.
Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father’s legacy and her mother’s addictions — testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. She spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love, the devilish and divine, with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses.
The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force that traces the story of a child, sculpted by kindness, cruelty and the extraordinary power of imagination, and her families — the one she’s born in to and the one she creates.
The blurb makes this book sound very grim – and it is grim, but the predominate feeling is hope. In fact it is quite uplifting.
It is told from Ari’s point of view and she has quite a unique voice – particularly in the first two-thirds when she is younger – it is lyrical and highly descriptive. It is Ari that makes this book so fabulous.
This novel is quirky and beautifully written about the families we make for ourselves and thriving not just surviving after terrible events.
Another review …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGJHEK3DN8