Shawnie [Paperback]

Ed Trewavas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2006

Each member of 13-year-old Shawnie's dangerously distorted household offers their own account of one intense summer.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ed Trewavas has held jobs as a van driver, a technical author, an office mule and a sports journalist. He has worked in South Bristol in a social work capacity for the last 13 years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Tindal St Pr Ltd (August 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 095479138X
• ISBN-13: 978-0954791384
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,443,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An everyday story of feral folk, August 22, 2006

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shawnie (Paperback)

Ed Trewavas has written an impressive first novel and given extra credibility because as a social worker in Bristol, England he has come across many of the situations he describes so graphically. The four members of the Brewer family are as soiled a bunch as you are likely to meet but they do exist up and down the country as a permanent underclass.

The two males, lover Steve and son Jason (15) are predictably in control of the females, mum Lisa (29) and daughter Shawnie (13). I've included the ages because this is one of the main points about these families, Lisa had Jason and Shawnie while very young and most likely dropped out of school, lived with the two children on welfare, struck up relationships with preying male partners who come and go. The males exploit the females sexually and the Shawnies of these families become pregnant and the cycle continues for another decade. Trewavas cleverly blends the main ingredients in these characters lives: endless casual sex, violence, drugs and drink, into a strong narrative that makes this family quite fascinating.

The novel is written mostly in a Bristol dialect and I did have some problems with this because it frequently slowed down my understanding and I had to re-read a sentence to decipher the words in dialect that had been spelt phonetically. Mum Lisa, in particular, speaks with a very strong accent, for instance, when asked where Jason is she replies, 'Well, I sees em, don't I? I sees ehm most days, but e ain't sleepen ovurl ours.' It helps if you keep a Bristol accent in your head (possible difficult for American readers) to translate all of this dialect. The only time the phonetic spelling seems to have come unstuck is the dropping of the h from hand, this requires an apostrophe to replace the h otherwise it could be read as 'and' yet still make sense in context. Removing the h from hit, for example, is no problem because it would make no sense in the sentence.

'Shawnie' is a very British novel but unfortunately teenagers like her and her family probably exist in most socially deprived areas of North America.