The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

539 pages

Publisher: Thorpe / Charnwood Large Print

Publishing date: January 2023

Library

Blurb

Open the safe deposit box. Inside you will find research material for a true crime book. You must read the documents, then make a decision. Will you destroy them? Or will you take them to the police?

Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult-like group who were convinced one of their member's babies was the anti-Christ, and they had a divine mission to kill it - until the baby's mother, Holly, came to her senses and called the police. The Angels committed suicide rather than go to prison, and Holly - and the baby - disappeared into the care system.

Nearly two decades later, true-crime author Amanda Bailey is writing a book on the Angels. The Alperton baby has turned eighteen and can finally be interviewed - if Amanda can find them, it will be the true-crime scoop of the year, and will save her flagging career. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart, better connected, and is also on the baby's trail.

As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realise that what everyone thinks they know about the Angels is wrong, and the truth is something much darker and stranger than they'd ever imagined.

This story is far from over - and it won't have a happy ending.

 

Review

WOW!!!!

What a book. What a story. And, what a setup. Unreliable narrator doesn’t begin to cover it. Saying this story is filled with twist after twist would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that whatever I expected the outcome of this story to be—and I changed my mind about that a few times while reading—it wasn’t anywhere close to what I discovered as the tale ended.

As good as this story is, I’ve got a feeling it won’t appeal to everyone. Not because there’s anything wrong with the story—there really, really isn’t—but because of the format in which it is presented. What we have here is a collection of emails, WhatsApp messages, and transcripts of conversations without a single paragraph of narrative, description, or conversation. When I started the story, I did wonder how long it would be before the format would start to irritate me. Now that I’ve reached the end, I’m very happy to say that the concept worked beautifully for me. In a way, it is as if Janice Hallett has turned a mystery plot inside-out. We are presented with all the facts, or rather, with all the information Amanda Bailey is willing to provide us with. This setup turned my reading experience more active; I had to do some of the work you would ‘normally’ expect the fictional investigator to do.

One thing became clear to me very quickly: If you want to make it as an investigative journalist/author, you can’t have too much integrity or worry about other people’s feelings too much. At least, that certainly appears to be Amanda Bailey’s approach. Now that I’ve finished the book, I’m still not sure if I actually liked her.

I don’t want to say anything else about Amanda’s (and Oliver’s) investigation. Suffice it to say that absolutely nothing is as it appears to be at the start and that every time you think you might know what’s going on something unexpected puts you on a different track. The final few pages are filled with shocking twist after shocking twist, and it was absolutely delicious. I can’t wait to read the previous titles by Janice Hallett.

When All Is Said by Anne Griffin

272 words

Book Club Read

Blurb

Five toasts. Five people. One lifetime.

'An extraordinary novel, a poetic writer, and a story that moved me to tears.' John Boyne

'I'm here to remember - all that I have been and all that I will never be again.'

At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual - though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening, he will raise five toasts to the five people who have meant the most to him. Through these stories - of unspoken joy and regret, a secret tragedy kept hidden, a fierce love that never found its voice - the life of one man will be powerfully and poignantly laid bare.

Heart-breaking and heart-warming all at once, the voice of Maurice Hannigan will stay with you long after all is said.

'A hugely enjoyable, engrossing novel, a genuine page-turner.' Donal Ryan

Review 

“I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I never be again.”

I know that line is in the blurb too, but it is so powerful I had to repeat it here, in my review. It is the essence of this book, a vivid description of Maurice Hannigan’s evening. Because the question at the soul of this book, as far as I’m concerned, is what constitutes a life? What matters when we near the end and we make up the balance of the years we’ve lived? Which are the memories that we hold on to and the ones we can’t shake, no matter how much we might want to? And who were the people who worked their way into our hearts and never left, even after their physical presence on earth came to an end?

As Maurice takes up his usual spot in the bar of the hotel, situated in a building that has haunted his life, he ‘talks’ to his son, who isn’t there and will therefore never hear the full tale of his father’s life. Unsurprisingly, it is in large part a tale of loss. The loss of Tony, who died too young of TB. The loss of Molly, Maurice’s baby girl who never had a chance to live. The loss of Noleen, his sister in law who despite having mental health issues played such a pivotal role in Maurice’s life. Maurice’s toast to Kevin, his son, isn’t at first glance, about loss. Kevin is still very much alive. But maybe that makes this toast even sadder, because it’s clear Maurice believes he never fully connected with his only child, who was the complete opposite of him. The final and biggest loss of all, the one that broke the camel’s back, is that of his wife, Sadie.

“No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone…it’s as if its’ been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.”

I’ve known for almost thirty years that loss can be a physical pain. And that, while the body recovers, the heart and mind take longer, and refuse to let go completely. That can be a blessing, but sometimes—and very clearly in Maurice’s case—good memories and even a life-time of love to remember and cherish are not enough to keep a person going. Combine loss with loneliness, and you come pretty close to a description of hell on earth.

“I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive.”

Poor Maurice, he blames himself for not being good enough to and for any of his loved ones. And yet, as I read his tale, all I could see what his humanity. He lived his life as most of us do, trying his best and not living up to the standards he sets himself. Because, while Maurice’s is the predominant voice in this story, you don’t have to read deeply between the lines to know that those he talks about would tell him he was more than good enough, despite his mistakes, misjudgments, and not always ideal decisions.

Part of me knew how this story would end when I read the blurb. All of me knew what was going to happen by the time I reached 5% of this story. For what it’s worth, I’m with Maurice on this one. Life may be and often is a gift. Gifts however, can be refused. And when a gift goes past its sell-by date, we are, or at least should be, allowed to discard it.

While I have no doubt there will be those who say that Maurice’s decision is selfish, I disagree. Because you can’t live your life for others alone.

Long story short, I loved this book. It took me through a full range of emotions, forced me to think and feel, and brought home, how much life has changed over the course of a life-time like Maurice’s. This is probably my favourite book club read of 2019, and I can’t wait until we get to discuss it. Opinions will, no doubt, be divided. 😊

Naming the Stars – A duo companion with Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston

Blurb

One of Ireland's best-loved novelists returns with a haunting novella of love, loss and memory

Flora's father has been killed in the Battle of El Alamein, one of the many victims of the Second World War. For Flora and her mother, life will never be the same again.
Now, it's just Flora - and Nellie, the family's life-long housekeeper - left; to reminisce in old age, and what really happened between Flora and her brother, Eddie, at the end of that long Irish summer.

Appearing now with Jennifer Johnston's classic novel, TWO MOONS

In a house overlooking Dublin Bay, Mimi and her daughter Grace are disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Grace's daughter and her boyfriend. While Grace's visitors focus her attention on an uncertain future, Mimi must begin to set herself to rights with the betrayals and disappointments of the past.

Reviews

Naming the Stars

A story about the price and consequences of promises kept and shared.

This is a deeply sad story, even if it doesn’t quite read that way. Flora and Nellie only rarely, and for short periods of time, allow the heartache each of them experienced to colour their moments. Most of the time they float along on a stream of long established habits; pushing away thoughts and truths that might disturb their quiet existence.

On the night described in this novella, they commemorate the last time they saw Eddie, decades earlier. He was Flora’s brother and Nellie’s secret crush and betrayed both of them in ways he was unaware of, shaping their lives while he threw his own life away. This night, for reasons that are neither explained nor obvious, they share their feelings and secrets, almost destroying the decades long and mostly artificial equilibrium between them.

The events Flora shares with Nellie are shocking and heartbreaking, and yet they are revealed in an almost emotionless manner, as if lives lost, denied, and thrown away are hardly worth mentioning. Because, the secret shared is of course one that some would say should never see the light of day.

This is the sort of story you’ll read with relative ease only for its full impact to hit you after you’ve closed the book. Only then do all the ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’ hit you with full force, leaving you feeling heartbroken for all involved.

And yet, no matter how much this is a story of love, it is also a tale of human resilience and the power of our minds to keep us going. I think it will take me a few more days before I figure out whether this was a depressing or ultimately uplifting tale. Right now all I’m sure about is that it was memorable.

“I’ve always wondered why the Americans consider happiness to be a right; of course it isn’t. It’s a prize that comes, sometimes for no reason at all.”

Two Moons

Like Counting the Stars, Two Moons is a story about secrets, although maybe in a different form. Whereas in the novella the main character had a shocking secret to share, in this story it is Mimi who just before she dies at last learns the secret that condemned her marriage.

I don’t want to say too much about what that secret is or how it is to be revealed, except to say that it will be achieved through the advocacy of a most charming, Italian, angel. By the time the ‘secret’ was at last revealed on the page I had long since guessed its nature — correctly. But then again, I think maybe I was supposed to do so, the clues were there to be found, even if Mimi either didn’t see them or refused to recognise them.

There are so many betrayals in this book; between husband and wife, mother and daughter, boyfriend and girlfriend. The characters face a constant battle between right and wrong, their own needs versus those of others, obligations versus desires. And yet, this is by no means a heavy book, nor is it depressing. It is a gentle tale in which potentially shocking occurrences float by, barely noteworthy and yet so very significant.

I like the touch of magical realism in this story. Mimi’s visitations can’t be written off as hallucinations, or signs of a crumbling mind, even if that’s what they appear to be at first.

“Do you mean to say that you are merely a figment of my imagination?”

“I never suggested any such thing. Some voice in you called and I came.”

I loved that the angel who may not have been an angel, left physical proof of his presence behind. It gave the story yet another layer of intrigue and, at times, a whimsical quality.

Also like its companion story, Two Moons is the sort of story to stick with you. It reveals all its various layers slowly; one after the other. I have no doubt that this story too will continue to play on mind for days to come.

Overall I have to say that I’m delighted I picked this book for my reading group this month. I had no idea what to expect before I started reading and was very pleasantly surprised by what I found between the covers. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have to read more of Johnston’s books; her well written, easy to read, yet thought-provoking stories do strike a chord in me.

Circles Around the Sun by Molly McCloskey

233 pages

Non-Fiction: Autobiography / Memoir

Blurb

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road.

When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly — having moved from the US to Ireland — hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike’s, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck — the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered  him unrecognizable.

Now, in Circles in the Sun, she tells that story — which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

My thoughts

“But it isn’t always those closest to us who see things clearly, or see them coming.”

I always find it harder to review non-fiction books than I do fiction. With a fictional tale there’s the question as to whether or not I liked it, enjoyed it, could lose myself in a different world and felt a connection to the characters. Of course those are aspects I don’t get to investigate with a memoir / biography, especially one that tells the tale of something as stark as schizophrenia.

On the other hand, there are a few things I can and will ‘judge’ all books on, such as the question whether or not the narrative was well written and how easy or hard it was to stick with the tale. So I’ll talk about that.

Circles Around the Sun is a very well written book. Apart from the fact that I’m convinced the author did all the research required to give her personal story a factual backdrop, she managed to turn what could have been yet another ‘woe-me-tale- into an intriguing and informative narrative in which the mixture of personal and general information was just right for me personally.

“What the rest of us will do is reinterpret that past. We will say there were signs — the separateness, the sensitivity, the bouts of introspection inappropriate to his age — but this may have less to do with him than with a desire to console ourselves. For some reason, we must believe that there were clues and that we saw them. That it was a secret he couldn’t altogether keep from us.”

This book is brutally honest, or at least, it reads as such. It can’t have been easy for Molly McCloskey to publicly confess to her long lasting indifference to her brother and the struggle he’s living, or to their parent’s inability to recognise that something is wrong. Still, it is the combination of almost clinical distance and heartbreaking detail that made this book both an intriguing and devastating read.

And yet, no matter how much it sometimes felt as if the author had distanced herself from the person and problem she was writing about, the book feels deeply personal. She doesn’t spare herself, doesn’t try to excuse her thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and doesn’t hide from her own struggles with mental health issues. That wasn’t always easy to read, and there were times when it was very easy to actively dislike Molly, but underneath it all was her desperate need to discover what had happened to her brother, her family, her life, and that desire was so understandable that I found myself relating to the author more often than I wanted to criticize her.

“Anxiety is essentially the condition in which fear is fearing itself. (…)If alcoholism is the condition that keeps telling you that you don’t have it, anxiety is a state of mind that keeps reassuring you that you are in its grip.”

And I can’t deny that the book was filled with more than a few statements and insights that spoke to me, such as the one below.

“Hell, of course, is not other people. Other people are merely irritating. Hell is the unrelieved self.”

Only a few days ago I finished When Light is Like Water a book I was less impressed with than I’d expected to be based on all the positive blurbs I’d seen. Now that I’ve finished Circles Around the Sun I have to admit that Molly McCloskey is indeed very good with words. Her descriptions, be it of people or of places, are vivid and her writing flows. But, I also think I much prefer this non-fictional work over the novel. And that’s saying something because I’m not really a non-fiction reader.

In my review for When Light is Like Water I wondered how much of the story was auto-biographical. This book answers that question with a resounding: quite a bit. The escape to Ireland, to the marriage to an Irishman, the house at the foot of a mountain, and the journeys to Kosovo, and Africa are all occurrences in both Alice and Molly’s life. So despite Molly saying in an interview on Irish radio that the her novel contains a kernel of truth around which she constructed a fictional story, I’m inclined to think it may be a wee bit more than ‘just’ a kernel. But then again, as she says in Circles Around the Sun, our memories and our realities can’t always be trusted. Why wouldn’t the same be true for what we see as fact and fiction?

“AS WE SEE THE CONSTANT CIRCLES AROUND THE SUN WE KNOW THAT THERE IS A REASON FOR OUR SUFFERING IN LIFE.” – Mike

Related Review: When Light is Like Water