Ghost Wall
As seen:
By Sarah Moss
avg rating
3 reviews
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Teenage Silvie and her parents are living in a hut in Northumberland as an exercise in experimental archaeology.
Her father is a difficult man, obsessed with imagining and enacting the harshness of Iron Age life.
Haunting Silvie’s narrative is the story of a bog girl, a young woman sacrificed by those closest to her, and the landscape both keeps and reveals the secrets of past violence and ritual as the summer builds to its harrowing climax.
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This short novel focuses on the experience of 17 year old Sylvie at an Iron Age historical reenactment in the Northumbrian countryside, at the insistence of her overbearing father. I found the descriptions of the natural world to be beautiful; the author captured the tension between the discomfort of wild living on the one hand, and the exhilarating experience of being more in touch with nature on the other. Unfortunately, Sylvie's father has fundamentally misunderstood the period of history he professes to be so interested in. Whether willfully ignorant or not, this fuels a racist and misogynistic world view, and the women in the story suffer as a result. The timelessness of misogyny is noted in the discovery of the body of a woman, preserved in a peat-bog, with injuries consistent with ritual abuse and sacrifice: 'her hands had been bound for two thousand years.' Suitable I would suggest for aged 16+, this book contains themes of domestic abuse and violence.
Amazing piece of sparse writing that conveys so much in so few pages. There are no excess words or description. Heartbreaking but unsentimentally told from the point of view of a teenage girl in a troubled household while on a historical re-enactment weekend. Sinister and emotive.
Devoured this gripping book in one sitting. She held my attention from the first sentence and although it's a short book there's an awful lot in there and it packs a powerful punch. Highly recommended.
