Friday, November 8, 2013
Close Your Pretty Eyes, by Sally Nicholls: review
Close Your Pretty Eyes is unusual in Young Adult fiction in having a main character who is younger than the target audience.
But teenage readers should be engrossed by the character of 11-year-old Olivia Glass, a damaged young girl who has grown up in the care system. Award-winning author Sally Nicholls does a fine job of presenting why this disturbed child behaves so agressively and often so illogically.
The book crackles with unhappiness. We see, in flashbacks, her traumatic past, but the bleakness is leavened occasionally with humour, as when Olivia says of one of the children at her new home "stupid Daniel, making social-worker faces at me" and calls her parents Grumpy Annabel and Dopey Graham. Olivia is the narrator and one you can never be certain is telling the truth.
It's when Olivia is sent to live at a secluded farmhouse (her 16th home) that everything takes an even darker turn. Although she begins to bond with her family, she is badly affected by living at a house that was once the site of a baby farm run by Amelia Dyer. Dyer was a real Victorian villain, who may have killed up to 400 children. Olivia starts to believe that the house is haunted and she begins to have murderous impulses.
Nicholls show us how destructive it is to grow up in a permanent state of fear and mistrust and though Close Your Pretty Eyes is a hard read in many ways, because there is a relentlessness to the sadness, it's a sensitive and powerful novel.
Close Your Pretty Eyes by Sally Nicholls (scholastic) RRP 6.99 ISBN 978-1-407124-32-2 is available to order from Telegraph Books at £6.99 + £1.10p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/3376d7da/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cbooks0Cchildren0Isbookreviews0C10A4357950CClose0EYour0EPretty0EEyes0Eby0ESally0ENicholls0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
