Lizzie’s Wish by Adele Geras is the second and last book I have and will read by her. I read Ithaka by her which had potential as a reimagining of the Odyssey legend but it had too much lust and desire.
However, when I heard of Lizzie’s Wish, it looked interesting, as it is about a girl who is sent to London by her awful, cold and vile step-father to live with some relatives while her mother is pregnant. She really wants to be a gardener, which interested me as I liked the idea of a woman who wanted to rebel against what was expected of her at the time. Also she had a major ambition to plant a walnut tree in the new house. She struggles to fit into her new life of being made to do needlework, going to school and other formal pastimes. However, she slowly fits in but longs every day for the letters she and her mother write. However, they stop suddenly and Lizzie has to find out why. This is the part that I thought would be exciting, but the resolution was so boring. It involved her and her uncle visiting her mother and finding that her stepfather had made her mother stop writing as he thought it might be too tiring for her. That is not a rescue mission as it is resolved by her uncle insisting that her mother comes to London where the baby is born. I expected it to be a bit more exciting than that.
The plot was very slow and it seemed to be just bits of events woven together into a story with no suspense at all. The ending was boring too, with the walnut tree that she is obsessed with having grown. This seems to preoccupy her mind a lot, as well as the baby after getting better after being ill. (The illness was not made exciting but with just a neat resolution with her cousin looking after him.) Ithaka, which I did not like, was more exciting, at least, as the violence and lust livened it up!
There were, however, a couple of things I liked: the book explored post-traumatic stress disorder, which her uncle William had after being a soldier in the Crimean War. This was interesting as it showed how little people understood the effects of war on soldiers and how it was considered great to do your bit for your country. Also, you would apparently come back as heroes and William does not feel that way, as he explains to Lizzie – he has nightmares, which she hears, and he also has lost an eye. It was also interesting that her cousin Charlotte wanted to be a nurse and defy the role expected of middle-class women, which was to marry, and there was a reference made to Florence Nightingale here. Lizzie’s uncle was attended to during the war by Nightingale and it was interesting how, like Nightingale, Charlotte battled with her parents to become a nurse but they did not want her to. However, irritatingly it was not decided whether in the end they would let her become one or not.
Overall, although this novel had interesting parts and had potential, it had an unexciting storyline with no tension. Therefore I would give it 2 and a half stars. Geras, although she is an intelligent woman, seems to have written two kinds of stories, one of which is unexciting with little action, and the other of which is full of too much lust and so-called passion.
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