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Netherwood
Feb. 20th, 2020 09:50 amNetherwood by Jane Sanderson was one of the books I picked up from a charity shop special offer, and I'm really glad I discovered it as I very much enjoyed reading it. It tells the story of Eve Williams, wife of a pit miner in the Yorkshire village of Netherwood around 1903. After her husband is killed in a mine collapse, Eve has to find a way to earn a living to support her three children, and the book charts her progress as a small business owner. She has to deal with the demands of the local gentry, the unwanted attentions of men in the village, and the growing popularity of her wares.
It's an odd book in some ways. It's richly descriptive, giving almost too many details of every domestic chore, building description, character background and recipe made. There's so much detail and background information that it takes three chapters for Eve to get out of bed and make a cup of tea at the start. The inciting incident that propels Eve into change doesn't happen for 100 pages, and the whole plot is very leisurely and meandering.
I found the phonetic dialect of the Yorkshire villagers a bit wearing after a while, and the way the scenes of the book jumped around in time was disorienting. It wasn't that there was more than one timeline - it was more that something interesting would be about to happen, the next scene would take place after that event, and then it would go back to relate the event itself a few pages later.
It also took me a while to get used to the George Eliot style omniscient narrator, as we got the inner thoughts of multiple characters constantly within every scene. And the number of characters whose point of view was given was vast. But, once I realised that was the style the author was going for, I could get on board with it. After all, modelling yourself on Middlemarch isn't a bad thing. It did mean there were a lot of characters that got a small amount of quite intense page time, but then weren't really in it again. And a whole new raft of characters suddenly got introduced towards the end. So the cast was huge, and most of them were quite important, but also very minor, which was odd.
I was a bit disappointed that nearly every male character either fell in love with or experienced lust for Eve (there was the reverend, her husband's miner friend, the estate manager, the heir, the publican, the London gardener...) - it got a bit much after a while and mostly didn't go anywhere. And then suddenly, one of the potential romance strands took over in a very unexpected way that seemed totally out of keeping with the setting and tone of the book.
The intermittent accidents at the mines seemed jarring as well, in what was otherwise a very sweet, mellow, old-fashioned style story.
And then there were a lot of things that were introduced as potential plot points right near the end and kind of just left hanging, so the end of the book felt a bit abrupt after a long and winding tale that didn't really go anywhere.
However, all that said - I loved this book! I was fully invested in Eve's story and really enjoyed spending time with her as a character. The locations of the book were beautifully rendered and very immersive. The cast of characters was varied and every one seemed like a fully realised person. It wasn't wildly emotive, but did have a few moments of high drama and a few others that tugged on my heart-strings and I was never bored by it. Overall, it was just a lovely read that I looked forward to getting back to every day and specially made time for in my busy schedule. I certainly went to bed later than normal over the week it took to read it, as I didn't want to stop reading to go to sleep.
So, if you like historical village-based stories with gentle drama, this is probably the book for you.
It's an odd book in some ways. It's richly descriptive, giving almost too many details of every domestic chore, building description, character background and recipe made. There's so much detail and background information that it takes three chapters for Eve to get out of bed and make a cup of tea at the start. The inciting incident that propels Eve into change doesn't happen for 100 pages, and the whole plot is very leisurely and meandering.
I found the phonetic dialect of the Yorkshire villagers a bit wearing after a while, and the way the scenes of the book jumped around in time was disorienting. It wasn't that there was more than one timeline - it was more that something interesting would be about to happen, the next scene would take place after that event, and then it would go back to relate the event itself a few pages later.
It also took me a while to get used to the George Eliot style omniscient narrator, as we got the inner thoughts of multiple characters constantly within every scene. And the number of characters whose point of view was given was vast. But, once I realised that was the style the author was going for, I could get on board with it. After all, modelling yourself on Middlemarch isn't a bad thing. It did mean there were a lot of characters that got a small amount of quite intense page time, but then weren't really in it again. And a whole new raft of characters suddenly got introduced towards the end. So the cast was huge, and most of them were quite important, but also very minor, which was odd.
I was a bit disappointed that nearly every male character either fell in love with or experienced lust for Eve (there was the reverend, her husband's miner friend, the estate manager, the heir, the publican, the London gardener...) - it got a bit much after a while and mostly didn't go anywhere. And then suddenly, one of the potential romance strands took over in a very unexpected way that seemed totally out of keeping with the setting and tone of the book.
The intermittent accidents at the mines seemed jarring as well, in what was otherwise a very sweet, mellow, old-fashioned style story.
And then there were a lot of things that were introduced as potential plot points right near the end and kind of just left hanging, so the end of the book felt a bit abrupt after a long and winding tale that didn't really go anywhere.
However, all that said - I loved this book! I was fully invested in Eve's story and really enjoyed spending time with her as a character. The locations of the book were beautifully rendered and very immersive. The cast of characters was varied and every one seemed like a fully realised person. It wasn't wildly emotive, but did have a few moments of high drama and a few others that tugged on my heart-strings and I was never bored by it. Overall, it was just a lovely read that I looked forward to getting back to every day and specially made time for in my busy schedule. I certainly went to bed later than normal over the week it took to read it, as I didn't want to stop reading to go to sleep.
So, if you like historical village-based stories with gentle drama, this is probably the book for you.
