Violet

Product Information

Kris Barlow and her young daughter, Sadie, have just suffered the traumatic loss of their husband/father in an accident. While Kris' feelings are understandably and realistically torn between her own emotions, finances, and adjustment, she also has to shoulder the grief of her daughter. This is the most challenging, as Sadie lapses into a near-silent, joyless existence--no longer the carefree, fun-loving child she used to be. Even as Kris tried to keep the unpleasant memories of her past mentally buried, it's felt through all of her thoughts, words, and actions. The town she recalls from her youth has changed, and yet it's like a psychological puzzle that she no longer has all the pieces to. My friend Luella Bartley and I started having brainstorming sessions together about what that ‘something else’ would look like, and the idea of Violet was born. For a while I had the intention of running both titles simultaneously, but then Violet just kind of took over. In the creation of Lula I definitely forgot other people would be reading it. It wasn’t until I first held it in my hands that I realised that and I felt very vulnerable, and very scared. I had forgotten it would be out in the world. It was so personal to me. But the experience was wonderful because of that. It was honest and personal. With vulnerability comes authenticity. This is ‘exactly’ the type of book I was sooo looking forward to - (an epic story spanning personal and global history over a hundred years).

I don’t mind a slow burn, but Violet was extremely slow. The pacing was a major problem for me. It would have worked so much better as a novella in my humble opinion. Meanwhile, in a small welsh town, a different Violet finds herself pregnant, unwanted and alone. She follows an oversees posting to Naples in the hopes of concealing her pregnancy from her mother. Here she meets the vibrant and characteristic Maggie and the two form an unlikely friendship. From a lyrical new voice in British fiction, an astonishing debut novel of motherhood and loss in the dying days of the Second World War - for readers of Max Porter and Pat Barker. I did write down in my notes that at the very beginning of the novel, I found the writing to be somewhat muddled. It felt like a train of thought—hard to follow if you’re outside of the writer’s head. It was also so literary that it didn’t at all feel like a horror novel until a quarter of the way through. It felt like Kris and Sadie were genuinely going to spend the summer at a cottage and that they would find themselves, not the horrors that awaited them. There were a few somewhat ominous events towards the beginning of the book, but, unfortunately, I think a little more action earlier on would have made the first half more engaging for the novel’s intended reader (horror readers!).

It was an emotional story of motherhood, loneliness and the courage of these two women. It is one I raced through and will definitely reread in the future. Also, that cover is 👌🏼 I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.

Unfortunately, Violet wasn’t my cup of tea, but I respect the fact that he is not afraid to experiment and go in a drastically different direction in his sophomore novel. That is always something I appreciate in any artist. And I plan on continuing to read anything he puts out.

Violet Book Issue 16

We follow, in approximately alternating chapters (sometimes the story stays with a character) the storylines of two Violets. All that being said, somehow I didn’t quite fully engage with the book. I think it’s actually a book I would have preferred to be a lot longer than it is. It’s quite short and it tells us two stories plus some poetry which necessarily means that each part is shorter still and I would happily have read more detailed and longer versions of each story. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics. Violeta Del Valle now 100, writes to her much loved grandson Camilo and tells him the story of her incredible life. Violeta was born in 1920 in the midst of the Spanish Flu epidemic which like everywhere else ravages Chile and she will die in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic, a strangely symmetrical coincidence of a life circle completed. It’s an amazing story of riches to rags following the 1929 Wall Street Crash and her family’s exile from the capital to Nahuel in the south of Chile where she blossoms. She tells of her loves and losses, her marriages, her passionate affairs one of which has a brutal element to it but which gave her children and her grandson Camilo, ‘her greatest love’. It charts her success as an astute business woman, we view women’s rights, political rights through which there’s a snapshot of Chile’s dramatic changes which have been well documented in her books and in others. The historical context is superb, it’s written with real clarity and includes stories of great bravery such as that of Albert Benoit.