The Home by Sarah Stovell

The Home by Sarah Stovell is a masterfully written multi-voiced narrative that immerses the reader in a a world that we wish didn't exist, as a society actively try to pretend it doesn't but deep down know that it's there: a world where children aren't loved and cherished but passed between children's and foster homes. Stovell forces the reader to confront our selective amnesia in a no holds barred story of girls in the care system. Bizarrely they're the lucky ones relative to what they've suffered in the past and to those still suffering the most harrowing of lives.

It's a heart wrenching story and Stovell keeps the writing crisp and clear, the most harrowing events seem almost devoid of emotion as they're told to us by the victim. When the story begins, Stovell writes in a factual and declarative way from the point of view of a corpse, it's not clear who is speaking at first and we, as readers, get to be detectives and gather clues as to their possible identity ... but it really doesn't matter, for whoever this has happened to its a tragedy.

The first person allows us to inhabit the minds, and lives, primarily of two fifteen year old, Annie and Hope, girls with traumatic pasts who are residents of a children's home in the Lake District. We get to feel the full impact of an overloaded and severely underfunded care system of which children are the ultimate losers, Stovell depicts them as simultaneously both naive and wise for their years. It's an incredible work of fiction in that it is all too plausible. There are hundreds of girls  like Hope, Annie and Lara whose lives are over before they've begun. There are definite shades of Stieg Larsson in The Home with Stovell's unerring ability to tell a gripping tale whilst at the same time reminds us all of our implicit social contract to help the innocent and bring the guilty to justice. It's one we are all guilty of neglecting to our shame.

There aren't enough superlatives to do justice to Sarah Stovell's The Home and I urge you to grab a copy as with all haste. 

Profuse thanks to Anne Cater and Karen Sullivan at Orenda Books for inviting me to be part of this tour.