Growing up in a picturesque but provincial English village in the fifties, eight-year-old April Harlency befriends an Irish girl who suffers the town's bigotry and a lonely bachelor who presses his affections on her. IP.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
This intimate, intensely seen novel was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize. Shena Mackay's six previous novels have won her critical admiration and a popular audience in England, but her work has not received due recognition in the United States yet. The Orchard on Fire is a concise, domestic novel set in the village of Stonebridge, where the parents of April Harlency have come in 1953 to run the local tea shop. April's private reveries and her entanglement with the grim family life of her best friend, Ruby Richards, fill up a vivid and dramatic year in the wonderfully distinctive life of Stonebridge.
From Publishers Weekly
It's always a puzzle when a writer as talented as Londoner Shena Mackay remains virtually unknown on these shores, but her comparative obscurity here, despite rave reviews for A Bowl of Cherries and her short-story collection, Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, may be dispelled with the publication of this finely wrought and touching novel. Narrator April Harlency looks back at the year 1953, when she was eight years old and had just moved to Stonebridge, in Kent, where her parents became proprietors of The Copper Kettle tearoom. April speedily becomes best friends with flame-haired Ruby Richards, daughter of the publicans who run the local saloon. The girls share a passion for reading, and for their secret sanctuary, an abandoned railway car hidden in an orchard. Despite their closeness, however, April can't bring herself to talk about the sexual molestation she endures from elderly Mr. Greenridge, who seems so kind and generous that April's oblivious parents chide her when she tries to stay out of his way. Nor does Ruby talk about her own father's physical abuse. Mackay brilliantly captures a child's voice and view of the world, the unspoken misapprehensions, fears and terrors?some imaginary, some well founded?that haunt April's dreams. Her prose a marvel of precise, evocative detail and almost sensual intensity, she shadows her gently humorous depiction of the ordinary daily life of a child?school, a Christmas pageant, the birth of April's brother?with the undertow of anxiety in April's mind. Ironically, while April seems the most seriously threatened by creepy Mr. Greenridge's increasingly bold advances, it is Ruby whose life undergoes a wrenching change. The ending, which involves a tombstone inscription that jolts both April and the reader, would be trite in other hands, but Mackay reworks a familiar fictional device into something poignant and true. The throb of real life among blue-collar families animates this subtle and compassionate story, as does Mackay's insight into a child's view of the world.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
remembrance of things past,
By christine syers (Kent UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Orchard On Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
If you are a female child born in the late 50's in South London, as I was, and if you also spent your young life in Kent, as I did, you will understand the mastery of this novel. I have never read anything which recalls this time and place in such a way that can only be described as 'Proustian'. The novel, 'The Orchard On Fire'has a particular 'smell' and 'truth' I have only experienced before in the novel, 'Wise Children' by Angela Carter. Fantastic and wonderful. Bless you Shena Mackay and thank you.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Less is more,
By Hetty Clews (Dr.) (Salt Spring Island, B.C. Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Orchard On Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
The power of this story is all in the telling; behind the ingenuous narrator, twelve-year-old April, the implied author stands in the beautifully realized shadows, and so orders the narrative that the reader is offered the ultimate compliment of creating his/her own perception of ultimate meaning. The characterizations, like the threads of experience, are rendered all the more powerfully convincing through economy; selective detail allows the reader's imagination full rein. I found myself deeply moved by the plight of all children under threat, whatever form the abuse may take, and comforted by the compassion of the creator. She writes like other well-loved novelists of mine, such as Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner;like them she engages me in enlightening reflection.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Childhood revisited,
By A Customer
This review is from: Orchard On Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
The characters in this story are what makes it so successful, especially April and Ruby two eight year old girls who are a perfect match for each other. The innocence of April and Ruby's daring wildness remind me of what a childhood experience is all about. I had wished that April revealed Mr. Greenidge's advances but was relieved that he wasn't cruel, unlike Ruby's parents however, who should have been reported long before they were. The reminiscences in the last chapter were a powerful reminder of how tied we are to our pasts. It is true that we "...purchase pieces of our lives..." at rummage sales but how else do we hang on to the past and share the dreams of others?
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